Foster Home No More

When Jack and I moved the heirloom dresser mirror and the remaining closet shelving unit out of the Foster home on Wednesday night, I thought I’d seen the last of the place. Today, however, Mari reminded me that we still have to get the bicycles in the basement. We’ll hold onto one of the extra sets of keys so that we can do that at our convenience at a later date. But meanwhile, Mari will be meeting with the hated, soon-to-be-ex-landlord at 1:30 on Friday to exchange the official keys for a security deposit. Check back in this space some time Friday afternoon to see how we did on that front.*

Some final thoughts on the about-to-be-concluded Foster chapter, which we opened almost eight years ago, after a single morning of apartment hunting courtesy of The Apartment People in July, 1999:

1350 W. Foster is the 23rd address I’ve had attached to my name and I spent more nights there than I have at any other address in the world—by a long shot. Second place, coming in at 3.5 years: 2015 Victory, Wichita Falls, Texas.

We never actually saw the apartment before we rented it. For some reason, our Apartment Hunter’s key wouldn’t work, so she just sneaked us into the apartment downstairs. We went on to look at another address further north before deciding that Foster was our best option. In the mean time, another Apartment Hunter had shown the place to another client who also wanted it, and when we got back to headquarters our hunter and hers got into it. They ended up leaving the decision to the landlord. We were led to believe that he picked us because he “likes families.”

When we met the guy for the first time, neither of us liked him. Our opinion of him did not change.

Hillel recommended the Andersonville neighborhood to us and one of its original benefits was that it was close to Hayt Elementary, where Maria had just been hired to teach. We love the neighborhood, but since Maria started working at Belmont-Cragin in 2001 (?) she has had a loooong commute across the city.


When we first moved to Foster, we didn’t realize that the Neo-Futurarium was but two blocks away. We had tried to see a performance of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind with Hillel the previous year, but it had sold out. We also didn’t know how easy it was to get to get to Evanston from our neighborhood or why we would want to go there anyway. Now, of course, we are two of the Neo-Futurarium’s biggest fans and Evanston has become our weekend home-away-from-home.

Obviously, 1350 W. Foster’s principal claim to subsequent fame will be as the first address Emilio called home.

*2 p.m. update: Landlord didn't show. Sent buiilding maintenance crew instead. They said the landlord has 45 days to return our security deposit and that we should call him sometime in August after his accountant has fixed everything. At that point, he will either mail us a check or we can pick it up from him in person.