You Can Never Go Back...

I drove into the town of 3000 or so people, and the streets looked familiar to me, even though I hadn't been down them in nearly thirty years. Some things had changed, too; I wasn't sure what, at first, but then it struck me. While I had aged thirty years, the little town had aged, too.

The streets were still laid out like I remembered, but the faces had changed. Not the faces of the people, though if I'd seen anyone from the 'old days', I'm not sure that I would have recognized them. Rather, it was the face of the town that had changed. More worn and rundown than I recalled, with many of the once familiar signs changed to different names, different things.

Gone was Burn's Hardware. The sign on the Bridge Lounge was faded and nearly illegible, and I found out later that it had not been open in years. Where once a small, red pole barn sat on the site of the original Trek Bicycle works, now there were several huge warehouses, squatting like an ugly, cancerous blight in what had once been a neighborhood.

I drove past the house in which I had lived for a couple of years, and was dismayed to see the paint peeling on the drab remnant of what had once been a house filled with the town's history. Gone from in front of the house was the old coachstone that had borne the name of one of the town's founding fathers. Gone were many of the old trees that had once shaded the sidewalks and lent a homey atmosphere to the area. Gone was the feeling of neighborhood.

I drove around the town for as long as I could stand it--a mere fifteen or twenty minutes--but long enough to let me see most of the town. So much looked the same, yet so much had changed.

My old home town had the look of a woman who, in her youth, was pretty and bright and polished. But that young woman has long since come of age, and in her declining years she has lost what beauty that youth gave her, and in place of that shiny penny, all that is left now is a tarnished and dying husk.

They say that you can never go back. I guess, in the end, they're right. Memories make such attempts bittersweet at best; at its worst, nostalgia just makes us feel old.

And so it goes...