Childhood's end (1)

My dad has lived almost all of his lifetime
in a 10 mile area of Harford County, MD.

The house of my childhood and teenage years,
and the house of my paternal grandparents,
are both tenths of a mile of where he's now
building a long-awaited retirement house.

But I don't miss either of those places at all
when I go back to visit with him nowadays.

What I miss is the Bel Air Bowl, which was
the first real refuge I had during the worst
years of late grade school (5th-7th) and the
slow spiraling downward of my mother's illness.

Scene of my first crush (my best girlfriend's
younger brother); my first being asked out on
a "date"*; and some of the early dates with my
first two serious boyfriends, during my senior
year of high school, before I left town for college,
and for good.

And of course the best girlfriend mentioned above,
Debbie Narvell, plus several other good friends
from juniors leagues who gave me Friday evenings
and Saturday mornings I could look forward to,
when sometimes there was little else positive
in my life.

So, if you see a lump in my throat when I find out
they've turned the location into an auction service
and a Gold's Gym, or if you see me watching the PBA
with a mixed air of longing and belonging, you see
what that small-town bowling alley meant to me.

*I was stood up, by someone whom I wasn't that interested in,
but who had absolutely *pestered* me to go out with him. So I saw the
original _Rocky_ by myself, because I had already bought the ticket
and couldn't get in touch with my parents to pick me up at the mall.