How It Started

Memoir Short Story: September 2025

In the early 2000s I had the unfortunate luck of graduating during a recession. Job prospects near Eastern Illinois University were slim, and before the introduction of LinkedIn or other digital job boards an English major like me had few opportunities in Chicago. To be honest, I was unprepared. I did not know what I wanted to do with my life, I had no real job offers after countless career fairs, and student loans hung over me like storm clouds. The one thing I did have was a graduation gift from my mom, my first real business suit. Armed with that suit and not much else, I moved back home after a short May term and started looking for work. By early June, with degree in hand and a love of books in my heart, I landed an entry level job at the local Barnes & Noble. I told myself it was temporary, something to hold me over until I found my dream job writing books or at least writing copy for a newspaper or magazine.

A few weeks into my bookstore job, living back in my mom’s basement, I got a call from State Farm Insurance. The irony was that I had only given a recruiter my résumé to cover the fact that I was trying to swipe a stress relief piggy bank from their table on a dare. It was not my English degree that impressed them but my Spanish skills, despite me once asking, embarrassingly, how much writing underwriters did. State Farm was starting a multilingual claims unit in Bloomington, Illinois, and they needed bilingual college graduates. I had no idea where Bloomington was. My mom worked for an Allstate agency, so State Farm was barely on my radar. Still, I printed MapQuest directions and made the two hour drive for a screening test and interview. On the ride home the job offer was waiting on our landline answering machine.

My second trip to Bloomington was in July to find an apartment. I did not know the geography, did not know a soul, and I had so little that I borrowed my cousin’s dress shoes to match my gifted suit for interviews. But I needed a job and a place of my own, so I said yes. As I prepared to move I asked to be transferred to the Bloomington Barnes & Noble. My reasoning was simple. A second job would help me meet people, make extra money, and keep me out of trouble. Another temporary situation.

So began my routine. State Farm from eight to four fifteen, then Barnes and Noble from five until close two or three nights a week, plus weekend shifts. I packed sandwiches and soup for meals, grateful the bookstore’s café now had a Starbucks for snacks. Somewhere in those first weeks I noticed a new barista. I did not drink coffee, but I bought an absurd amount of SoBe drinks and discovered hot chai just to have excuses to talk with her. She was a student athlete at Illinois Wesleyan, a school I had never heard of. I could write about her blonde hair, her blue eyes, her smile, but what I remember most was her warmth and genuine kindness. In a town where I knew no one, that kindness was a lifeline. What began as small talk across a café counter grew into a friendship, and eventually into love.

While Krista became the heart of my new life I also found community at work. Colleagues there became lifelong friends who celebrated weddings, mourned losses, and stood beside one another through births, divorces, and funerals. Together we grew up. Those friendships, along with Krista, inspired me to get involved beyond work. We volunteered, mentored, and served on boards. We poured energy into our community because others had once done the same for us.

Bloomington was where Krista and I built our family and found our community. It was where I learned what true love and strength meant, what it means to be selfless. It was there I watched our children take first steps, speak first words, and reveal their budding personalities, our bald until three singer, our gray eyed snuggler. Bloomington was where we learned how to be adults, navigating haunted houses, spontaneous trips, music filled nights, and late night counseling sessions.

I lived in Bloomington for almost twenty years. I arrived with nothing, hand me down furniture crammed into a van, an empty bank account, and no local friends. I left with everything, a heart full of love, a family full of life, and a mind full of memories. By all logic I should have stayed in Chicago, but destiny pulled me to Bloomington. It gave me my blue eyed muse, our curly haired activist, our kind hearted thinker. It gave us memory keeping friends who chronicled our lives. If I have given back even a fraction of what I received, I am content. But even if not, that community will always have my respect, my compassion, and my promise to pay it forward. Because Bloomington to me is not merely a place, it is where it all started.