My childhood neighborhood felt like my entire world, mostly Field Avenue and Mohawk Avenue, and it felt like that was always the way things ever were. The more I branched out, to Minnesink Blvd. and, gasp, Delaware Avenue (where all the bad kids lived), the less mystical the other end of Field Avenue began to feel (the area where the road ends and leads up to the railroad tracks, what we called “The Jumps” back in the day). Going back now, they’re just roads.
Mostly. Thinking now, trying to put my head in its three-year-old, four-year-old, five-year-old space, I feel a little of what I felt then, when every corner was a new world, where even a five-minute-walk down the road could be something special.
Such was the case when, on Saturday, I was in Jinju for the first time in eight years.