Another Visit To My Family's Old Hometown - Lodi, NJ

Recently, chance brought me to my old hometown of Lodi. My family lived there in the early 1980's, so I associate Lodi with those times. Being a very young child, that meant first and second grade at Columbus School, and walking to and fro every day. That also meant the cartoons and toys that I was really into, which includes but is not necessarily limited to the Incredible Hulk (remember, the series with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno), the Lone Ranger, the Remco Monsters, and of course, Mego Super Hero figures. Plus, I really liked the New York Giants.

This was the first extensive visit to my old hometown of Lodi since I actually visited (or rather, just basically drove through) another town of Lodi, this one out in California's Napa Valley. I got my brother a bottle of wine from that town, just because it seemed like a cool idea to get some wine from a town by the same name - the only other Lodi that I specifically know about (although it is also a song by Creedence Clearwater Revival, as well as the birthplace of the chain of A and W fastfood restaurants). The wine from there is apparently not as reputable as those from nearby Sonoma and Napa Valleys, but it seemed special to me, given the name connection to our family's old hometown.

Lodi, New Jersey is not known for wine, or much of anything else, really. It is a typical northeastern New Jersey suburb of New York, with shoulder to shoulder housing. There are a lot of neighborhoods, and quite an assortment of small shops and businesses, as well as some larger ones in the downtown area. The library is nice and fairly sizable, and the Boys and Girls Club is large and nice, not all that different from when my brother and I would go there when we still lived in Lodi.

Naturally, some things have definitely changed in Lodi, NJ, since we lived there. Some of the things I noticed years ago, but some things I noticed were quite different this time around. Some stores that existed then, such as Pergament and Acme supermarket, were gone before. Now, Kmart was all closed up, with little to indicate that it had ever been there in the first place. There was another store that we used to go to, not a name brand. There were concrete posts all around the main entrance, and I remember thinking that this would not fly in this day and age, because it seemed to prevent access into the store for anyone in wheelchairs. But that store is now gone, too, I am pretty sure, now some kind of fitness place. The concrete posts have been taken down, to boot, which I would suggest is an improvement, frankly. 

A Visit To My Old Hometown - Lodi, NJ - Originally published on Saturday, September 20, 2014

Yes, my family used to live in Lodi, New Jersey. It is a suburb within the greater New York metropolitan area.

We moved there about one year or so after moving back to the United States from France, hoping to find a greater measure of stability and independence. I attended first and second grade at Columbus Elementary School while we were there.

Thomas Wolfe published a novel with the title, "You Can Never Go Home Again", and since then, that has become a popular expression that means different things to different people.

There are places from childhood that you remember fondly. You cannot be sure if it was because the place truly was nicer, better, or if it was because you were yet a child, generally happy in your blessed innocence and ignorance. Often times, when you do return, trying to capture just a taste, or a glimpse, of that former happiness and innocence, it is not there for you. Perhaps you are reminded of those times, but it is almost like watching a movie or reading a book - as if it were something that happened to someone else entirely. Probably because it is not you anymore. You have moved on, and are living a life filled with stress and problems, as most of us seem to be doing now.

Childhood is a magical time (for many, if not most, of us) not only because of the freedom from health problems that it provides, but also, there is a certain measure of freedom from stress more generally. You do not have to worry about having or finding a good job, or paying ever more bills, or preparing for the future, or any of that. That is taken care of for you by ADULTS. And it is ADULTS who know best, which means that, for the most part, you can lay back and enjoy the ride. At the time, it feels like it will be like that forever. On some level, you understand that, someday, an impossibly, unthinkably long time from now, you will yourself be an adult, and have to assume responsibility. But it always feels like something that is more rumor, or myth, than reality. Childhood is the time to let ADULTS worry about the bigger things, and to take care of you. You trust that they will make the best decision for you, even if (or perhaps especially if) you don't like it. The childhood assumption, which itself reflects the blessed naïveté, the innocence of youth, is that someone is looking out for you, and that is reassuring. And so, you are led into the false belief that things will go on this way forever. Theoretically, everyone assures you, there will reach a point where you, also, are an ADULT, but the reality is that, surely, you will always be a child.

By the time that you really know differently, it's already too late. The toys of childhood are put away, and we begin to focus on a future that, quite all of a sudden, no longer looks impossibly far away. Perhaps it's still a little hard to believe that it will actually happen, yet we notice that we are bigger now, physically and mentally, that we have grown. We are in that strange, yet wonderful time of life where we are neither fully adults, nor fully children (In my own head right now, I hear Alice Cooper singing "I'm a boy, and I'm a man...).

We recognize that childhood is likely the most magical time of our lives, and the freshness of each new experience will not likely ever be repeated. You may have good, even incredible experiences as an adult. Food will never taste as good, energy will never be so pure and unbounded, good health will never come so effortlessly, nor be taken so easily for granted again. Happiness comes much more easily. A piece of candy, or a cool toy, can make a child very happy, even if the attention span of a child usually is far too short. Mostly, we hardly even pay attention to all of the good things, the benefits, that ADULTS almost warn us to savor, to enjoy, while we are still children. What we suspect is that they are placating us, trying to make us feel better about not being able to stay up later, or have more money, or other such things. For the most part, we view our own childhood through what we do not have, rather than all of the things we have, and so we cannot wait to grow up.

Once we grow up, who among us would not, in a snap, go back to childhood, even for a day or so, if we could?

Of course, that is not a real option. We cannot simply go back to our childhood. But we can revisit the places of our childhood, and so many of us actually do this. Why? Probably to capture a moment, or catch a glimpse of that old magic. And maybe we do, and maybe we don't. But often time, we can remember these places, and what they meant to us when we were small but growing up. More often than not, they prove to be smaller than they seemed to us when we were little. Things may have changed. Sometimes, for the better. Sometimes, for the worse.

In the case of my own childhood in Lodi, it seems that the town actually has changed for the better, if anything. I remember my parents saying that it was a priority to move out of Lodi, because it was kind of a tough town, and my brother and I were showing signs that we might head in the wrong direction. And so, we moved to West Milford, which has it's own perks, and it's own downsides. Both Lodi and West Milford have changed greatly, but in the case of West Milford, it generally has not been an improvement. There are far more people, and the countryside, once well preserved, has increasingly been compromised. There never were traffic jams before, now, we have traffic lights, and there are places where you might have to wait in a line of traffic, which was almost unthinkable even ten or fifteen years ago, let alone thirty-plus years ago, when we made the move. West Milford has become one of those expensive towns that a lot of people like me are priced out of. West Milford has changed, but again, not necessarily for the better.

Lodi seems to have improved, at least from what I can tell. It does not feel as "tough" as it used to, although my memory of it is actually not all that strong anymore. The public library was pretty impressive, and puts the library at West Milford to shame. The schools look like they are perhaps in better shape than I remember them being back then, although they were not crumbling or anything. But somehow, Lodi just looks....well, newer. Better.

On some, rather distant level, I can almost say that I feel "proud" of Lodi, and I'm not trying to be condescending, or anything. Things have changed, and I miss some of the changes. But for the most part, it looks better than it did when we lived there. Case in point, I was absolutely fascinated by skyscrapers back then. I mean, it went to extraordinary lengths, how taken I was by these things! In my imagination, I used to picture the water tower there as the Empire State Building, and these two ugly ass smokestacks right by the center of town as the Twin Towers. Those smokestacks are now gone, although the water tower is still there, looking more faded and, frankly, rusty, than before. Still, Lodi just looks more open, and more happening, if you will, then it was when we lived there.

What else do I remember about Lodi? Not too much. We used to walk to school every day, and it was a fairly lengthy walk, even longer than I remember! But in those days, the streets felt safer, somehow, and maybe that is why parents were not as nervous about allowing their children to walk unattended for such a long distance (several blocks, at least). I remember waiting at the concrete lot that served as the playground before school, and hanging out there during recess. I remember the tiny apartment, and the people above us, who we rented from. They were Greek, and the two girls there used to roller skate. The youngest one hit me with a stick when I first arrived. As it turns out, she had a crush on me, and that was how she expressed it. Stacey and Violetta, that was their names. I remember some of the old neighborhoods, even going to a party at one point, at a home a couple of blocks from where we lived. A few stores I remember from around there, as well. One with a whole bunch of metal posts around the entrance, which I imagine blocked any handicap access. Too many memories, really, to write all, or even most, of them down here.

It was nice to visit my old town, and have the flickers of memories on again, even briefly.

Still, even though I cannot go back "home" to Lodi, I do enjoy going there. I now have a storage space located in town, and so trips there often also offer me a chance to drive through the old town, and I have been meaning to go there with camera in hand. This last time around, I had my cell phone, and despite my fatigue, I decided to go ahead and take some pictures, with hopefully more to follow on another trip in the not so distant future.

After I did what I had to do at the storage space, I visited a friend who now lives in Lodi, in another part of town completely than the neighborhood we used to live in. We talked for a few hours, but before long, I grew tired, having worked the nightshift, and then headed straight to Lodi afterward.

And so I returned back home to the town I now live in - Hillsborough. It's not such a bad town itself, although my memories of it are much more recent, and strictly as an adult. As much as I like Hillsborough, it does not - cannot - hold the same memories as Lodi, one of the towns that I lived in during that most magical of times in most of our lives - childhood!

I took pictures, and I must say that the old apartment building, and the other homes around there, did not look radically different than when I remembered them while living there! I recognized them right away!

So, here are some pictures of my old home town from that recent trip:

This was our old apartment back in 1980-1982, when I attended Columbus Elementary School (not pictured), where I got through first and second grade. 

Lodi Memorial Library, a part of the greater municipal complex, which looks nice from the outside (nicer than it did when we were living there, surely)! The inside of the library was quite nice and spacious looking, and they seemed to have a pretty decent fiction collection, when I visited it!

A view of the old apartment complex with the neighboring houses.

Views of the municipal complex, which looks very nice on a sunny late summer/early autumn day.


The Boys & Girls Club of Lodi, which my brother and I used to go to. I remember it had some games, including video games, and it also used to have a trampoline, at least on special occasions. It looks newer than it used to, too, apparently having been renovated and restored.