I'm going to start a blog* called The Cranky Old Townie's Restaurant Guide, where I review restaurants by comparing them against the last restaurant in that spot, even if the cuisine has gone from Italian to Lebanese or shwarma to sushi. Each post will be titled "That New Place Where [X] Used To Be," and sometimes I will spend so long talking about the old place that I won't even get around to reviewing the new restaurant. This is what fifteen years in the same city has done to me.
When I got directions to my first post-college apartment, the landlord kept mentioning "the old Sears building." I was like, "Can you tell me what it's called now?" He paused and said, "I think it's called the old Sears building." Now, this was BG (Before Google), so I couldn't search "old sears building Boston" and find the Landmark Center. I had to go around asking people who'd lived in Boston for more than four years until I found someone who didn't think I'd lost my marbles.
That was eleven years ago. Now my husband and I have entire conversations about places that would make every college student in Boston stare at us blankly. Bob Slate is the latest unfortunate addition to our ghost stores. I never thought I'd be saddened by a stationary store's demise, but I was heartbroken. I bought my college scrapbooks and diaries there. I pick them up now and remember sitting in Bob Slate, going through the shelves notebook by notebook, carefully searching for the perfect one. It's funny that my search for an object to hold my favorite memories became one of those memories. (There's probably a German word for that phenomenon, something like thinkenstuffestraminer.)
I feel like I have a million stories like that, and I'm only 33. Heck, there's a Morphine song playing on a truck commercial right now and I'm resisting the urge to tell you all about the time I saw them and the day I found out Mark Sandman had died. (I am going to allow myself a cranky townie moment and tell you that if you don't know Morphine, you should go and listen to them now.) I can only imagine how much more cranky and townie-ish I'll be in another fifteen or thirty years. I'll have a whole ghost city to tell my daughter about by then, the same way my father has taught me to remember things about my hometown that happened decades before I was born. I like that thought. It makes me feel less senile for calling the Thai restaurant where we got dinner on Friday "that place where the schwarma place used to be."
*no I'm not
I used to do that too in Bob Slate -- sit on the floor and look at EVERY SINGLE NOTEBOOK until I found the perfect one. I don't know where I'll do that now.
ReplyDeleteThe other day someone posted this on Facebook with the comment "Still awesome 8 years later." I LITERALLY thought she was making a joke. The Darkness? EIGHT YEARS AGO? I think of them as a "new band." I was never into them so I'm sure that's a big part of it, but I certainly remember that song, and...*eight years*?
I would totally read The Cranky Old Townie's Restaurant Guide.
(this is Catherine from SF, BTW)
I still think of the Postal Service album as being pretty current, and it also came out eight years ago. Heck, Death Cab has released three albums since then! Heh, OLD!
ReplyDelete(There's probably a German word for that phenomenon, something like thinkenstuffestraminer.) This is just AWESOME!!!
ReplyDeleteI have a similar issue. It is called: "can't we just go back to the old name building that is named after a bank that has been absorbed by a new bank that was bought out by a different bank"? It's Great Woods, Harbor Lights, and the Boston Garden; you can suck it, Mr. Big Bank.
Bob Slate is gone? I hate how much the Square has changed ...
ReplyDeleteMel-I have no idea what Great Woods is called now! Is it the Comcast Center? I heard that name the other day and was like, "Where the heck is that?"
ReplyDeleteJasmin- It closed last weekend, depressing the entire city of Cambridge and much of Boston.