Childhood's end (1)

[netpositive]

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.

Comments

Home.

[candyguru.livejournal.com]

Whereas when I think of the place I grew up, I think of Kettering. The house where I spent the biggest single chunk of my childhood (fifth through twelfth grades, 1983-ish through 1991) is still there, and as it's right smack in the middle of a residential development it's not going anywhere. The resident right after us enclosed the backyard with a six-foot white privacy fence, keeping us from seeing the green grass or lack thereof possibly, but other than that the house is still the same... or at least it was the last time I saw it, two-ish years ago.

And the grocery store a block up the road is still there. Dots. It hasn't shut or become a Kroger's or anything, and other than the technology of the cash registers evolving, it's still pretty much the same place it was fifteen years ago. The Gold Circle half-a-mile away is now a Value City Furniture, and the Hills Dept. store has been sitting empty since before we moved away. The Dipper Ice Cream Parlor, which is in the strip mall with Dots, is still standing, although it's a pet beauty parlor now. So my childhood, with a few minor changes here and there, is still intact.

Where the depression sets in is when I think about Oxford, not because of how it's changed -- other than the water tower coming down a decade ago, it's still pretty much Oxford -- but because it was more or less my greatest failure. That part I wouldn't mind changing so much.

[halleyscomet.livejournal.com]

Seems this sort of thing is going around this week.

And I agree, seeing parts of your childhood destroyed is depressing.

[netpositive.livejournal.com]

Partly it's summer/vacation time, all those family obligation things crop up. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you now, Ms. Whuffle's groom-to-be? ;)

I haven't been inside either my parents' or grandmother's houses since they were sold to other people, in 1987 and 2003 respectively. I know that both purchasers have done additions or extensive renovations. In either case, knowing the houses [and the condition the houses were in at purchase time *rolls eyes*] I can't blame them. I'm idly curious as to how my grandmother's place (a 4 bedroom 1820's brick farmhouse) has turned out - it had good bones, and I once fantasized about tearing out the two tiny east bedrooms on the second floor in order to have a two-story library. :) But I don't feel any particular emotional attachment to those two houses, no.

The closest "town", Jarrettsville MD, was two miles away. I've described it to people as "400 people and 4000 cows". It was originally more of a geographic cluster than an actual place: my parents' address changed several times without us ever moving, as the postal system changed us from a Forest Hill zip code to a Jarrettsville one, from Rural Routes through P.O. Boxes to actual Jarrettsville Rd. street numbering. The local grocery store where my mother worked behind the meat counter has been closed since the owner died, its windows covered with dusty and tattered brown paper, but the drugstore next to it is still open, and the hardware store across the street finally reopened under different management. J-ville finally joined the 20th century just a few years ago, when they replaced the 4-way blinking red with an honest-to-goodness stoplight, because the whole area is becoming a bedroom community to Baltimore (and perhaps even to DC - I have known of people commuting to DC via the MARC train from Edgewood or Aberdeen). Maybe someday they'll join the 21st century by getting a McDonalds. :)

Bel Air, ten miles away, was where I went to both grade and high school. It shifted orientation dramatically during the '90s - quite literally, as MD Rte. 24 (Main Street & Emmorton Rd.) was officially supplanted as a major arteries by Business U.S. 1 / Baltimore Pike & MD Rte. 24 / Vietnam Veterans Memorial Highway. (Emmorton Rd. became MD Rte. 924.) The comic book store I worked in as a teenager has been gone since the mid-80s, though the physical building is still there. My two favorite pizza places have changed ownership, but are still pizza/sub places; my favorite Chinese place has the same owners and the same dark, juicy beef fried rice I grew up on; and blessedly, the old-style wood floor roller rink outlasted the one with the icky plastic.