The Way You Were

Task 32, August 9 to August 16

“Progress may have been alright once but it has gone on far too long”. Ogden Nash

The other day I decided to drive by the first apartment I rented in Hollywood. I don't get over that way much anymore and I thought it might be fun to cruise my old neighborhood. But it wasn't fun because everything I remember it being, both physically and metaphorically, had indelibly changed. For example, the seedy movie theater on Hollywood Blvd, the "World", a squalid and somewhat shady cinema I frequented because of the $1 double features and butter-slathered popcorn, is now an empty lot with a chain fence around it. That really bothered me. I felt...unsettled. But why? It wasn't a place of fond memories...

So why was I bothered that it was gone for good?

This nagging feeling of loss stayed with me throughout the day. The apartment building was small and shabby; a Staples store stood where the corner grocery store had been; Victor’s Liquor but remodeled and…sleek. After a time I turned around and drove back across town to my home, a safer environ. As I drove, I pondered and I tried to unravel the Gordian knot that entwined my feelings.

I realized that I have a tendency to look at my life as a timeline. And in my timeline are moments, both good and bad, that resonated with me and are often represented by physical places--the movie theatre, or the corner store. Their absence triggered a nagging fear: if the place is gone, is that part of my life gone as well?

There is a part of me that hates progress. I understand that life can't stand still and that one man's $1 movie theatre is another man's "I am going to rip down that shoddy building and sell it for a million bucks and move to Sun City", and I understand that Staple's office supplies better serves a neighborhood of Gen-Z tech heads than a tiny bodega, but nonetheless it galls and wearies me.

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So, I decided to visit the places that are the notches on my timeline before they have vanished. My life is cleaved, landmark-wise, into two parts: my Ohio life which stretched from birth through college, and my California life, where I have been ever since. During my last trip to my hometown I visited my childhood home, a mansion to me then and a matchbox now; my high school, a beehive of teens in the past, but now an empty edifice in a bad neighborhood; a candy store, from which i liberated Clark bars and Skittles, which still stands; my church, the bowling alley where my dad bowled with his Knights of Columbus buddies, etc.

Back in LA, I dined at El Coyote, a Mexican Restaurant that I once haunted to imbibe their incredibly cheap and watered-down marguerites; I went by the Pantages theater, where I toiled in the ticket office in the early 80s; I strolled down the Santa Monica pier, watched an AYSO game at a grade school where my son once played, and on it went 'til I was sated, memory-wise...

TASK:

Try to visit the places that make up your timeline, physically if possible, or by google if necessary; conjure up their memories and roil in them regardless if the memory is good, bad or ugly. It has to be acknowledged before it vanishes.

Write down your feelings. Arrange them chronologically. A story will unfold.