A Walk Down Memory Lane

My daily walk at dawn takes me along a path made familiar by many years of use. I take the sidewalk along Wilson Boulevard toward Ballston, turn right on Glebe Road, and return home via Fairfax Drive. My many steps equal about three miles and follow an everyday sameness that would bring unrelieved boredom to many. For me, the subtle changes in the familiar sights provide an avenue from which to inspect the present and reflect on the past.

When I pass Dunkin Donuts early in my morning sojourn, I see the building, but I also see what used to be there: the black, flat asphalt parking lot used by Edmonds' Ford, formerly at the corner of Tenth and Wilson and now occupied by Arlington Auto Care.

As I pass Mario's Pizza, I remember the smell and wonder of it when it first opened. I worked as a kid reporter after school at the Northern Virginia Sun in those high school days. The newspaper was where Arlington-Pentagon Cleaners is now, across the street from Mario's. It was at the Sun, working for 25 cents a column inch, that I tripped on several of my earliest moral dilemmas, and realized the power of the written word.

Further along, across from the Arlington Art Center, sterile asphalt supports used cars where once stood an old tavern that was as legendary for the smell of its ancient beer stained floor as it was historic.

What is now called Ballston has a rich lode of memory for me. I recall as a youth traveling down Wilson Boulevard in a bus that I saw dust rising above a solid wooden fence there. I turned to my father for an explanation and he told me it was a sign that the Washington Redskins were scrimmaging on what was then their practice field.

My most important memories of this piece of earth, near the intersection of Wilson Boulevard and Glebe Road, come long after the Redskins left, unseated by the Hecht Company department store. Passing Hecht's releases strong, sweet memories. It was in this fortress-like building that I first met Joyce behind the art supply counter, befuddled her with strange, lonesome stories, and then talked her into marrying me.

A building across Glebe Road from the Hecht Co. also calls forth special memories. It once housed an art supply store called Hill's in which I spent several years selling and making picture frames. I glance at it every morning and my memory promptly recalls incidents from that time, so full of promise and happiness, common to all those newly married with a baby. It was also a time of shadowy anxiety on the cusp of the country's most renting modern moment, the Vietnam War. This area is the closest to a holy shrine of any place along my route.

In recent months, I have become accustomed to the sudden sepulchral shadows of bulldozers which appear innocently one morning and, by the next, stand naked beside a pile of rubble. One recent Saturday, as I passed the edge of the Hecht's store, I saw an emptiness across Glebe Road where so many memories had resided.

Seeing the old Hill's store, a broken heap of concrete at the feet of an ugly yellow bulldozer, I realized how important the place had been to me and how much I was going to miss the sight of it every morning. Hill's as a business has been gone for more than a decade (a bicycle store went in after it closed), but the presence of the building gave me a place to anchor the memories from an important part of my youth.

The flash of anger that occurred on seeing a reflection of my past turned into a pile of rubble reminded me that intimacy with a place can create an emotional landmark of a life. Seeing that landmark destroyed can have a surprising personal effect. Such landmarks provide reassurance and secure memory which gives us a clear sense of place and belonging. Is this not why we mark the graves of those we loved? Without such landmarks of memory, we may float, rudderless and without purpose.

My early morning walks may not have the thrill of a daybreak stroll through Rome where it appears nothing is thrown away and everything remains as it has been for centuries, but the daily hike is more than a stroll down memory lane. I have come to realize my morning constitutional contains important remanents of events that have provided comfort, anger, inquiry, wonder, bewilderment, and friendship; in short, all the things necessary for intelligent life.

As my personal landmarks have begun to disappear, I have awakened to a unsettling side of the American character, perhaps even humanity itself. Instead of preserving the mundane and ordinary from a past that endures into the present, we constantly demolish it, destroying the keys to our own and society's rich, humble past and to an understanding of the present. The habitat of Twentieth Century America, polished by its residents with laughter and hardship, has begun to shift constantly, leaving an uncertainty with a disturbing power to destabilize our lives.

An artifact is sometimes necessary to light a long hidden memory. When all the artifacts disappear, memories lie dormant in a place where the past cannot be examined with the fresh eye of the present. Memory (which others may call history) has the power to nourish our inner lives and without it much is lost to the present and to the future. Whether the absence of these personal landmarks and their memories, is a fatal affliction remains to be tested.

--Tom DeBaggio