Exploring Bloomington: From the Janeway Statue to Mom's Childhood Home

Starting the Journey to Bloomington

We chose Bloomington because of friends. A couple we’re close with from New York moved here four years ago when the woman in the pair was appointed as a professor at Indiana University (IU). We wanted to meet them and explore the local attractions.

They didn’t have any specific plans for the day, so I opened the Atlas Obscura app and suggested two places: the Slocum Mechanical Puzzle Collection and the Captain Janeway statue. They were unaware of both spots. After four years of living in Bloomington, they still didn’t know that the city is home to over 30,000 antique puzzles or that there is a bronze statue of a fictional character who wouldn’t be created for another three centuries.

Experiencing Slocum

At Slocum, my children tried out almost every puzzle in the room—from wooden geometries to tricky boxes and classic sliding games. My husband, the family’s brainiac, struggled with a game called Chinese Rings: six metal rings tightly interlocked that must be threaded through a U-shaped wire. The goal is to remove all the rings and then put them back in their original place. It looks simple—just pull them out—but the strings get in the way. You can’t just take them one by one; you have to jump through the rings, backtrack, and execute a precise series of 31 steps. In the end, he couldn’t solve it. Meanwhile, my kids were merciless. Now, they’re demanding a puzzle cabinet at home.

The Janeway Statue and Its Significance

Next, we headed to the Janeway statue, and I became the storyteller. I’m not a Star Trek fan; in fact, I probably wouldn’t have stopped here if my kids hadn’t come along. But they were eager to know: Why would a city erect a statue for someone who isn’t real? Who builds a statue for someone who won’t exist for another 300 years?

I read the information plaque and researched on the app. Captain Kathryn Janeway was the first female captain to lead a Star Trek series. She commanded a starship stranded 70,000 light-years from home for seven seasons, making impossible decisions—each with its own consequences. She was created by Jeri Taylor, a woman who grew up in Bloomington, graduated from IU with an English degree in 1959, and became one of the few women writing scripts and producing in the Star Trek system.

Legacy and Personal Touch

Taylor fought for representation in a male-dominated environment. She gave Janeway her hometown. After retiring, she donated her works to the Lilly Library—the same place my kids had just solved puzzles. This statue was entirely funded by fans, women who needed Janeway to exist. They saw themselves in a captain who never apologized, required no explanations, and simply led. I stood there looking at her—this bronze woman on a pedestal in a small Indiana town—and thought about the times I had sat in rooms where men doubted me.

Discovering Family History

After saying goodbye to our friends, I had one more stop to make. Before the trip, I texted my mom to let her know we were heading to Bloomington. I knew she had studied at IU for two years, but I didn’t realize she had also lived there as a child, from ages 2 to 7, while my grandfather worked on his Ph.D. I was 45 years old and had never known this. She sent me a list: 423 Jordan Street, her first home. University Elementary School, the swimming team with the underwater windows where she swam with Mark Spitz. Teter Quad. The Hub. The beautiful campus with a river running through it. I was in a rush and only noted the address without reading carefully.

We found the house after saying goodbye to our friends—even though the street was no longer called Jordan. It had been renamed Eagleson a few years prior when the legacy of David Starr Jordan, a supporter of eugenics, was exposed. My mother didn’t know. The address she had held in her memory for sixty years no longer existed as she remembered it. The house sat on a hillside behind a concrete stairway. A two-story Colonial house, painted light gray, with white columns at the entrance. Evergreens crowded the entryway—junipers and arborvitae that had grown for decades. A sunroom beside a wall. A brick chimney. It looked like a professor's house, not that of a family working through a Ph.D. It was more than I had imagined for a young academic family in the late 1950s.

The Missing Pieces

I took a photo and then drove away. I marked it off my list.

A few weeks earlier, I had taken my kids through my childhood years in Florida—at the towns of Maitland and Winter Park. I showed them my elementary school and the historic town of Eatonville nearby. They asked many questions and wanted to understand how my upbringing influenced why I wrote a book about the wealth gap between Black and white people and why equality movements emerged throughout my life.

At my mother’s childhood home, I had nothing to say. Both my grandparents had passed away. They had a bitter divorce, and after separating, neither spoke about the life they had shared together. My grandmother—whom I adored, who was beautiful and always put together—never mentioned Bloomington. It was “before.” It no longer existed. Writing this, I realize: I never asked her. I never urged her to talk about the years before the divorce. I never asked what her life was like as a mother in her twenties, with a child and a husband building a career. I never asked what that house felt like, what the kitchen smelled like, whether she was happy. My grandmother passed away in 2021. Now I can’t ask her anymore. I wonder—if I had prompted her, would she have shared with me? Or would she have deflected, as she always did when discussing the past? I will never know. That’s part of the pain: not only because she’s gone, but because of the questions I should have asked but didn’t. And now I stand in front of her house at 45—an age she was when she lived there, with children my age at that time—and there’s no one left to answer, except my mom. Who is still here. Who texted me a whole list of memories. Why didn’t I invite her along? I could have brought her to Bloomington. We could have walked up those concrete steps together. She might have shown me which window was her bedroom, whether she remembered the backyard, what her parents were like before everything fell apart. But instead, I just marked it off my list. I took a photo from the car.

Life Is More Than Just Photos

I think about all the travelers making lists of must-see places. They check off boxes. Snap photos for Instagram. Drive by houses just to say they’ve been there. How many truly feel a place? Spend time there meaningfully? With the right people? Many of my journeys through all 50 states have been meaningful—but now I realize it’s because I shared them. The puzzle room came alive because my kids were there. The Janeway statue mattered because I could explain it to them—and in doing so, I realized many things about myself. I even showed my friends corners of their own hometowns they didn’t know about. In other places, like the horse cemetery in Kansas, I met locals. But the stop that had family significance, I did alone, without anyone to recount it with. I was in a hurry. I just checked it off the list. Some places you can explore alone. But places like your mother’s childhood home, her first kitchen—they need a storyteller. And if you don’t bring one, you’re just taking a picture of a house. Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo wrote: "It is people, not places, that make stories."

Original article sourced from: Atlas Obscura