Time
marches on.
The
more things stay the same, the more they change.
Yes,
I did flip the cliché. Said things change the more they
change.
A
few weeks ago, I went to visit my parents. Stayed in the old house.
I’d tell you I stayed in my old room, but I didn’t. I picked the
bigger room with the bigger bed. Still, huge sense of familiarity
and comfort.
Each
day of my visit, I went out for a walk. I switched up the route
every time, and my mother joined me for a couple of them. One
I was kind of excited by when I set off was most of the route
I used to travel when I walked every day to elementary school.
As the car drives, the length one way is just about a mile. As
with anything, a turn here or a crosswalk there can change the
end result by a bit.
As
kids, we would head down to the end of one circle and cross the
lawn of a family we knew really well. That led us into a wooded
section with a brook that flowed steadily and provided hours upon
hours of exploration and fun during my youth. At least the major
portion of that land had been developed about twenty-five years
ago, with a new road and some houses built. But other than this
section, the neighborhoods were remarkably unchanged.
And
it’s in that lack of change that the passage of time became evident.
One
house has added a sunroom-style sitting area in the front. Someone
in my grade lived there, and I had been inside many times growing
up. I don’t know if his family still owns the property, but it
seemed from a distance to be a nice little area for relaxing a
bit. It was also one of the few changes to any existing property
that I could really be certain of.
All
the other houses, including ones of friends and classmates, even
appeared to mainly be the same homes, with the same shutters and
same colors. It was a bit of an eyebrow raiser, since my parents
have changed the house color, then moved to siding, brought in
a shed and added a small room in the back in the years since I
moved out. To see so many places looking visually the same with
no changes at all seemed somewhat comforting thanks to the familiarity,
but also felt wrong.
Wrong?
Yes.
Wrong.
Countless
houses were aging, and not too gracefully. Many needed new roofs.
Some required a lot of repair and replacement parts before you
would even consider beginning a decent job of repainting it.
One
friend of mine had an older sister that bought what seemed to
us at the time to be a pretty great car. In the back of the house
where he lived a car was partially covered by a tarp. The portions
exposed were incredibly rusty, and seemed to belong to what remained
of her vehicle.
The
biggest changes of all awaited at the school.
When
you go a place perhaps 1,500 times in your life, the memories
are imprinted rather strong. Seven years, one-hundred-eighty school
days per year, that alone easily clears 1,200 days. Start adding
in using the grounds to play, or to cut across to the park, or
for community meetings and organized events, and yeah, I remember
the school.
The
basic structure is still there. Same two wings with an all-purpose
room extending out toward the back. Separate building that had
been the kindergarten remains in place. But a lot had been modified.
Some portions seemingly repurposed and redesigned.
The
part that sticks with me about all of it though was out back.
A playground. That’s been added since my days at the school more
than four decades ago. On a bench in the playground was a small
plaque. It was dedicated to two people for their tireless and
generous efforts, and years of service at the school. And that’s
when it really hit me.
Those
two people could have joined the school staff at any point in
the 1980s, with it possibly their first job. They stayed there,
perhaps got married and had kids and sent those kids to school
and then watched them get married, and eventually they retired.
That plaque didn’t have a date. Looked new enough. Maybe there
only a year or two or three. These two wonderful people may have
delivered thirty-five to forty years of never working any place
else, and while there experienced a lifetime of personal activities
from marriage to kids in college to grandchildren arriving. And
yet, I am old enough today and long past my days of education
at this school that my journey never crossed paths with theirs.
Lifetimes—literal
lifetimes—had moved along since I regularly walked these roads
on a daily basis.
The
truth is, you can go home again. But all that’s old isn’t necessarily
still wonderful, and all that is new isn’t necessarily bad. The
real world is a bit more complicated than that, especially if
you just let sit without some attention.