Mnemosyne and the City Block

By chance, I was in the vicinity of my old neighborhood the other day and decided to drive through. I frequently drive by it but very rarely through it, though when I lived in my last place, its streets were almost as familiar to me as the back of my hand. As often happens with the passage of time, I found that I now had a different feeling about it. What was once merely commonplace and familiar now had a heightened significance: the brief excursion was like a homecoming of sorts, in spite of the fact that I still live in the same general area. (You'd probably laugh if you knew how close my current place is to my last one, but sometimes even a small distance can make a big difference. It feels like a different world over here.)

So I drove through and noted something that shouldn't have surprised me but did, a little. The streets of modest bungalows mixed in with a few apartment buildings were mostly intact, but here and there houses had been torn down and replaced with what I take to be student housing, newer construction that doesn't match the look of the older brick dwellings and single-family homes of the neighborhood. I'm not certain if a person unfamiliar with the old look would be struck as much as I was by the patchwork quality of the neighborhood as it is now, but to me it was as if I had seen the handwriting on the wall. The neighborhood is changing--I wonder how much of it will even be there 20 years from now.

A eulogy is still somewhat premature, and I really have no say in what happens to a neighborhood I don't live in, so I'm strictly giving my personal reaction here--but it did make me sad. It's not the fact of change in itself but the way in which it seems to be tearing holes in the fabric of something that used to seem organic and of a piece. I used to walk those streets every day without thinking about them much, but after driving through the other night, I started thinking about Joni Mitchell's song "Big Yellow Taxi." It is indeed true that "you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." Understand, we're not talking paradise here, but rather a very ordinary neighborhood . . . though I don't know, I guess it depends on how you define paradise.

I started to remember small things from the days when I was a familiar sight on those streets: the day in late April, finals nearly completed, when I suddenly noticed how gorgeous the dogwoods were at the end of one street. The flat-roofed home that I always thought looked like a Florida house, an anomaly in that neighborhood but a reminder of my childhood. The stretch of shady street overhung with trees that somehow gave the impression, for a quick half block, of a country lane, especially on a hot summer day. The house with the lamppost in the front yard that gave me a comfortable feeling, especially that night I was out walking with friends and the lamp was on when we passed by. I couldn't find it the other night and don't know if I just missed it or if it's been torn down.

After my detour through the neighborhood, I was in a thoughtful mood, thinking about things, people, and places that have passed through my life. In a strange miracle of timing, a friend from the old days called the next afternoon to say she was going to be in town. I told her about what had happened. We didn't spend a lot of time reminiscing, but the subject of how much time has passed did arise. She commented on how long ago it all seems, and I said that to me it feels like almost another lifetime. She herself, however, seemed unchanged, which was some consolation.

I was just writing about the inevitability of flux last week. If someone is going to put up a new building, I would rather they did it with some regard for aesthetics, but realistically speaking this isn't always going to happen. Nevertheless, places matter, as do trees, buildings, and homes. One realizes that paradise will occasionally be paved over, as Ms. Mitchell says, for a parking lot (or parking structure, in this case), and you're going to lose a lamppost here and there, and as long as some things remain constant, I guess it's not a total loss. Knowing that it won't always happen, I still wish, though, for some attention to things past and some respect for the spirit of place, something our society hasn't always been good at giving.

If we don't respect where we've been, how can we build something worth moving toward?