Part of my childhood vanished today. When I was growing up I lived across from the high school where my father taught. On the corner of the school lot closest to my house was an old ball diamond. It was just the right size to play catch and games of five hundred. When I was growing up I literally spent hundreds of hours there with my friends playing ball, flying kites and playing hide and seek. I knew every square inch of the grounds there, I knew where the smooth spot was where we could play marbles and the trees that made the best spots to count to a hundred for hide and seek. In winter there was a bit of a hill there and we would slide down the hill and across the lawn. We also played fox and goose there. That involves tramping a wagon wheel in the snow and playing tag on the tramped down pathways. When it warmed up a bit we would make snowmen and have snow ball fights there. It was an important part of my childhood, and when I got to high school it still played an important part. It was where we would eat outside on a nice day and just hang out. It may have looked like a flat, featureless piece of earth to strangers but it held many memories for my friends and I.
Well it appears that progress reared it’s ugly head and that Joni Mitchell was right…today they started tearing out the area trees, memories and all and are building a paradise…part of my childhood has vanished and I am feeling a bit wistful right now.
Snoopy once made a pilgrimage back to the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, and found a parking lot where it had been. “You’re parking on my memories!” he shrieked.
Mr. Rilch and I had our first day at Three Rivers Stadium. Opening day 1993; I asked him. When plans were gearing up to open PNC Park and raze Three Rivers, Mr. Rilch said, “Guess what they’re putting up on that property.”
[long ruminative pause] “They’re parking on our memories!” A parking garage is, or will be, where once was the site of Mr. Rilch’s and my First Date! There go our ten-year anniversary plans.
Everytime I drive into the village I was born in (and where my parents still live), another farm has been torn down and replaced by modern, anonymous houses. My kindergarten school doesn’t exist anymore - it was replaced by single floor apartments for the elderly (not that there’s anything wrong with being elderly, albeit in a single floor apartment or not).
When I was a kid, a 300 meter walk from my parents house would place me at th edge of a large moor. Nowadays, there’s a provincial road crossing in between, and it takes a 3 kilometer detour via traffic lights to get there.
It’s progress. And it’s melancholy.
I would say it’s part of getting old, but I’m only 28, dammit!
It’s the same for me, Coldfire. I grew up in a rural area too. Everytime I go back, another farm has been replaced by a big, expensive house. Rich people from the nearby city are buying up the farms and building huge houses. What used to be miles and miles of farmland are now beginning to look like a suburb for the rich.
Welcome to another thing that sucks about getting old. Whenever I visit my hometown, something else is missing . . . And I’ve only been in New York 20 years, but I wander down the streets thinking, "that’s where Altman’s used to be . . . " "That’s where I used to get the papers at Hotaling’s . . . " “That’s where TIMES SQUARE used to be!”
Sucks, don’t it? Maybe we could all move to some third world country with a terrible economy that isn’t likely to change in our lifetimes. Of course, we’d want nicer, larger homes than what the locals live in…might have to tear down a farm or two.
It seems to me that “parking” might make for an interesting ten-year anniversary.
I’m just mad that my favorite bagel store, where I had breakfast almost every morning, and had not only a “usual” but also an “alternate usual”, simply disappeared one day.
back in may, my fiancée and I took a trip to Houston. We went to Pasadena so I could show her where I grew up and where some of my friends lived. The house was still there, still sinking deeper and deeper into the ground. But the garage was gone. I didn’t know that it had been torn down. Looked very strange. Everything else was the same, except when we turned the corner down the street, one block down the street was gone! Ahh? what happened? I used to walk down that street to go to kindergarten, first grade, second and third! The day care on the other end of the now disappeared street was gone, to make room for the ever expanding Pasadena High. Alas. You can never go home. But everything else in Houston, Pasadena and South Houston was just as crappy as I remembered. Except it is all in spanish now.
I lived the first few years of my life in a three-family house. It was situated up on a hill, on a corner. When I was older, and had been living in a different place for a few years, my parents would drive up the hill and show me their first house when we happened to be in the neighborhood. It was a part of my personal history.
Recently, we were driving through the neighborhood, and decided to visit the place. As we drove up the hill, we thought something was amiss, but we couldn’t tell what. Then we got to the top of the hill.
The house was GONE. There was only a grassy lot left where the house had been. It was very disturbing, since the house was in no way ramshackled or rundown. Still, it just wasn’t there. It was so unsettling, we actually went back down the hill to make sure we were in the right place.
That has to be the weirdest feeling I’ve ever had.
