Wanderin' Around
Oct. 30th, 2008 08:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogI seem to be all photospammy lately.
Last night's post paid homage to a 1979 movie that I always think of when Verizon, Frontier or (as yesterday) the Talking Phone Book delivers the new goods.
Today's memories move ahead five years from then. I finished a major Chapter 11 court appearance in record time this morning, and wound up in my original Rochester neighborhood after that while waiting for clients to check in with reschedulings of things we'd planned for later. After parking barely a block from my original home just off the Park Avenue strip, I found myself with a touch of nostalgia and headed one house down to see if the old place still looked the same.
Yeah, pretty much:
I didn't get much time to apartment-hunt, lo those 24 autumns ago. My job offer came through in mid-September and they (and I, as well) wanted an October 1 start date, so I shot back up in a hurry to check things out in a city I'd visited, maybe, a half-dozen times before then. This place had one of the few mid-September offerings with furnishings included; I'd acquired some in my law school years in Buffalo, but wound up sloughing most of those off after graduation and the Bar exam came and went without a job offer. This place enabled me to travel "light" until I knew the job, and the city, were right for me.
Needless to say, they were. In my almost two full years on the second floor of that house (the front window on the right was mine, along with roughly a third of that floor), I chose my future law specialty, the one that brought me back to town this morning; made and grew friendships including some lasting until this day; joined the first church I ever chose on my own and, with it, met my future wife; voted against Ronald Reagan for the second and final time; regained my love of the Mets after almost a decade of baseball apostasy; and generally began the life that, 24 years later, far more resembles my current one than it did the preceding 24 years spent wanderin' around this crazy state of ours.
Little of that neighborhood remains the same, other than the houses like my former one on the side streets. The cornerstones of my life back then were the Bells (for years before that, a Star) supermarket, both names now long gone from the scene, as is the grocery store itself. Security Trust was the bank on the corner, now a Bank of America at least a half dozen name changes since then. A client ran the Big Apple Cafe that was kittycorner to my kitchen window; it's now a sushi-tapas place called Pirhana. The deli on the opposite corner, long run by the hostile Lower East Side meat man with the heart of gold, is a Panera-like place called Camille's, where I held forth for most of my post-court break today. Only Jines restaurant, the laundromat, and the CVS (still with the tow truck circling, pirhana-like, in its car park to deter diners from the lot-less restaurants from poaching) had any feeling of home to them.
It's been 24 years since this wide-eyed kid came to that strange town to seek his fortune, most of which he lost after moving back, in office only, to a firm there many years later. I've spent 21 of those years as a husband, almost 17 as a father. The "for rent" sign in front of my old building resonated with me about as much as a "McCain-Palin" sign would have (thankfully, the opposition had far more of their signs on the neighborhood lawns). Still, I'm glad to have finished early enough to spend those couple of minutes at 1313 Memory Lane. I may not want to go back, but it's always good to remember the way I've come.
Last night's post paid homage to a 1979 movie that I always think of when Verizon, Frontier or (as yesterday) the Talking Phone Book delivers the new goods.
Today's memories move ahead five years from then. I finished a major Chapter 11 court appearance in record time this morning, and wound up in my original Rochester neighborhood after that while waiting for clients to check in with reschedulings of things we'd planned for later. After parking barely a block from my original home just off the Park Avenue strip, I found myself with a touch of nostalgia and headed one house down to see if the old place still looked the same.
Yeah, pretty much:
I didn't get much time to apartment-hunt, lo those 24 autumns ago. My job offer came through in mid-September and they (and I, as well) wanted an October 1 start date, so I shot back up in a hurry to check things out in a city I'd visited, maybe, a half-dozen times before then. This place had one of the few mid-September offerings with furnishings included; I'd acquired some in my law school years in Buffalo, but wound up sloughing most of those off after graduation and the Bar exam came and went without a job offer. This place enabled me to travel "light" until I knew the job, and the city, were right for me.
Needless to say, they were. In my almost two full years on the second floor of that house (the front window on the right was mine, along with roughly a third of that floor), I chose my future law specialty, the one that brought me back to town this morning; made and grew friendships including some lasting until this day; joined the first church I ever chose on my own and, with it, met my future wife; voted against Ronald Reagan for the second and final time; regained my love of the Mets after almost a decade of baseball apostasy; and generally began the life that, 24 years later, far more resembles my current one than it did the preceding 24 years spent wanderin' around this crazy state of ours.
Little of that neighborhood remains the same, other than the houses like my former one on the side streets. The cornerstones of my life back then were the Bells (for years before that, a Star) supermarket, both names now long gone from the scene, as is the grocery store itself. Security Trust was the bank on the corner, now a Bank of America at least a half dozen name changes since then. A client ran the Big Apple Cafe that was kittycorner to my kitchen window; it's now a sushi-tapas place called Pirhana. The deli on the opposite corner, long run by the hostile Lower East Side meat man with the heart of gold, is a Panera-like place called Camille's, where I held forth for most of my post-court break today. Only Jines restaurant, the laundromat, and the CVS (still with the tow truck circling, pirhana-like, in its car park to deter diners from the lot-less restaurants from poaching) had any feeling of home to them.
It's been 24 years since this wide-eyed kid came to that strange town to seek his fortune, most of which he lost after moving back, in office only, to a firm there many years later. I've spent 21 of those years as a husband, almost 17 as a father. The "for rent" sign in front of my old building resonated with me about as much as a "McCain-Palin" sign would have (thankfully, the opposition had far more of their signs on the neighborhood lawns). Still, I'm glad to have finished early enough to spend those couple of minutes at 1313 Memory Lane. I may not want to go back, but it's always good to remember the way I've come.
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Date: 2008-11-01 08:22 am (UTC)I, too, lived in the upper level of house right after graduating from college. I shared it with my college roommate, and we were both working at a group home for teens at the time. We were broke, stressed out, and I look back at it as one of the most enjoyable times in my life now. Funny. Thanks for the memory jog.