The intersection of Wheaton Way and Sylvan Way is by no means a pretty corner of town, but it does harbor an awful lot of soul. We can thank the moon and raspberry pops for that.
But full moons and frozen treats don't come along every day. Most days that stretch of road is pretty hard to take. Face it, the intersection of Wheaton Way and Sylvan Way is a mess. It's a curious mix of businesses, that's for sure, all tied up together with a ton of traffic, a mess of telephone poles, a tangle of electric wires, and a god awful sense of aesthetics. The wacky mixture of over the top signage, shoddy architecture, incongruent style and questionable taste is sometimes a bit too much to bear, but then, when you think of Highway 99 and the mess that that one's made up and down the coast, well, that little patch of heaven in East Bremerton is just par for the course.
Regardless of how it looks I find myself haunting that part of town on a fairly regular basis. First off, there's a Grocery Outlet, a Value Village and a tasty pizza joint, Westside Pizza, all anchoring down one corner of the strip. Up the block and around the corner there's a Goodwill, a pawnshop, a pho restaurant, a number of Mexican joints, a post office and the library. Regardless of how it looks I find myself over in that part of the world every week for business, for shopping, for noshing and for any number of other low-brow consumer pleasures. At one time that neck of the woods was also a spotting station for you, too, M, a sort of Stations of the Cross, Bremerton-style, but we both know that those days are long gone.
So I suppose you can say that whenever I hit that part of town I am wisked away into a zone of rough nostalgia. Those memories generally play fast and loose with me, if only because they encompass both the good and the bad sides of life, and sometimes, when I really want to probe deeply, even the ugly side of it, too.
But today the weather was bright and cheery and all things were sweet and right in the world. I just finished dropping off the library van and received a small handful of accolades for a job well done for the program we presented at the WLA conference. As I walked to the bus stop I figured in a few minutes of shopping, and took in a phone call with the Estranged One as well. Those talks are coming along nicely, and today I found out that The Boy will be coming back in May. I figure if I just keep to the course that I've set for myself these last couple of weeks I should be good to go for the rest of spring and into summer. Good in that I wiped my slate clean and that I've set my mind to go forward on my own for awhile. Just me and the cat and work and the house. The Boy. Your memory. That sounds like a mighty fine plan for a pretty spring day.
But back to that intersection. Gosh, couldn't they make it a bit more pretty? Bury those wires, unify those storefronts? Make sense of the parking, the lighting and that ragged mix of businesses? Looking around it's easy to get distracted while I'm doing my business there, to be once removed from the moment, but that has more to do with personal history than with the wacky assemblage of buildings spread out before my eyes. For instance, whenever I sit and wait for the bus, the bus that will take me back to the ferry, I also find myself waiting for a phantasm to appear, for the ghost of that small silver car of yours to go whizzing by on it's way to a coffee date or a rendevouz up the hill at Bataan Park. Strange, but there it is, the power of suggestion and space and old times.
Old times. I know that this month, poised on the edge of the anniversary of Your Talks, is an open calendar filled with events that I prefer not to revisit but find myself gawking at, like a man standing on the edge of a great and messy automobile wreck . April 28th is looming. It will always be The Day, the last of the Calcopo's, the last great moment where we ruled and everything, I mean EVERTHING, was possible.
And yet I know that when that day comes and goes that it will be just another day, that I will be very much aware, yeah, very clear on, that those plans we generated are just dust and memory and so many calendar pages on the floor. Just as well, for what I see coming up on the 28th looks to be just another pretty spring day and for that I am eternally thankful.
In the end I suppose it's all about how I want to honor that place, that sacred ground of memory. That Grocery Outlet is still my prefered place to food shop, but it is also charged with helping time stand fast, with holding onto those little moments, ones where we gathered canned tomatoes and raspberry pops in those very busy aisles. The Value Village doesn't have that green oversized chair we sat in anymore but it does have our holographic image stuck somewhere there in the book racks and toy aisles.
Pat's is not immune, either, and our phantoms float around someplace near the coffee counter. That whole damn parking lot is loaded with ghostly stereoscopic imagery, of cars and vans and teary eyed lovers in passing, and that is something else entirely, something that I have to be in the mood for, or else I just move along quickly and get myself on down the road. Every time I go there it's just like coming home, and yet everytime I arrive I find myself wanting to catch the next flight out of that old life and back into my new one. Thank goodness for that, too.
Someday I might leave this region, and if I do I know that I will find my way back there, if only to stop and listen and look, look to see if I can find the ghosts of those two sweet people who found their way onto a park bench in front of Value Village one summer evening, just to sit and snack on frozen treats, talk to the locals and watch the moon rise up through the wires.
Wheaton and Sylvan Way. A geocache site of our hearts and my very weary soul.
Your WHMB
But full moons and frozen treats don't come along every day. Most days that stretch of road is pretty hard to take. Face it, the intersection of Wheaton Way and Sylvan Way is a mess. It's a curious mix of businesses, that's for sure, all tied up together with a ton of traffic, a mess of telephone poles, a tangle of electric wires, and a god awful sense of aesthetics. The wacky mixture of over the top signage, shoddy architecture, incongruent style and questionable taste is sometimes a bit too much to bear, but then, when you think of Highway 99 and the mess that that one's made up and down the coast, well, that little patch of heaven in East Bremerton is just par for the course.
Regardless of how it looks I find myself haunting that part of town on a fairly regular basis. First off, there's a Grocery Outlet, a Value Village and a tasty pizza joint, Westside Pizza, all anchoring down one corner of the strip. Up the block and around the corner there's a Goodwill, a pawnshop, a pho restaurant, a number of Mexican joints, a post office and the library. Regardless of how it looks I find myself over in that part of the world every week for business, for shopping, for noshing and for any number of other low-brow consumer pleasures. At one time that neck of the woods was also a spotting station for you, too, M, a sort of Stations of the Cross, Bremerton-style, but we both know that those days are long gone.
So I suppose you can say that whenever I hit that part of town I am wisked away into a zone of rough nostalgia. Those memories generally play fast and loose with me, if only because they encompass both the good and the bad sides of life, and sometimes, when I really want to probe deeply, even the ugly side of it, too.
But today the weather was bright and cheery and all things were sweet and right in the world. I just finished dropping off the library van and received a small handful of accolades for a job well done for the program we presented at the WLA conference. As I walked to the bus stop I figured in a few minutes of shopping, and took in a phone call with the Estranged One as well. Those talks are coming along nicely, and today I found out that The Boy will be coming back in May. I figure if I just keep to the course that I've set for myself these last couple of weeks I should be good to go for the rest of spring and into summer. Good in that I wiped my slate clean and that I've set my mind to go forward on my own for awhile. Just me and the cat and work and the house. The Boy. Your memory. That sounds like a mighty fine plan for a pretty spring day.
But back to that intersection. Gosh, couldn't they make it a bit more pretty? Bury those wires, unify those storefronts? Make sense of the parking, the lighting and that ragged mix of businesses? Looking around it's easy to get distracted while I'm doing my business there, to be once removed from the moment, but that has more to do with personal history than with the wacky assemblage of buildings spread out before my eyes. For instance, whenever I sit and wait for the bus, the bus that will take me back to the ferry, I also find myself waiting for a phantasm to appear, for the ghost of that small silver car of yours to go whizzing by on it's way to a coffee date or a rendevouz up the hill at Bataan Park. Strange, but there it is, the power of suggestion and space and old times.
Old times. I know that this month, poised on the edge of the anniversary of Your Talks, is an open calendar filled with events that I prefer not to revisit but find myself gawking at, like a man standing on the edge of a great and messy automobile wreck . April 28th is looming. It will always be The Day, the last of the Calcopo's, the last great moment where we ruled and everything, I mean EVERTHING, was possible.
And yet I know that when that day comes and goes that it will be just another day, that I will be very much aware, yeah, very clear on, that those plans we generated are just dust and memory and so many calendar pages on the floor. Just as well, for what I see coming up on the 28th looks to be just another pretty spring day and for that I am eternally thankful.
In the end I suppose it's all about how I want to honor that place, that sacred ground of memory. That Grocery Outlet is still my prefered place to food shop, but it is also charged with helping time stand fast, with holding onto those little moments, ones where we gathered canned tomatoes and raspberry pops in those very busy aisles. The Value Village doesn't have that green oversized chair we sat in anymore but it does have our holographic image stuck somewhere there in the book racks and toy aisles.
Pat's is not immune, either, and our phantoms float around someplace near the coffee counter. That whole damn parking lot is loaded with ghostly stereoscopic imagery, of cars and vans and teary eyed lovers in passing, and that is something else entirely, something that I have to be in the mood for, or else I just move along quickly and get myself on down the road. Every time I go there it's just like coming home, and yet everytime I arrive I find myself wanting to catch the next flight out of that old life and back into my new one. Thank goodness for that, too.
Someday I might leave this region, and if I do I know that I will find my way back there, if only to stop and listen and look, look to see if I can find the ghosts of those two sweet people who found their way onto a park bench in front of Value Village one summer evening, just to sit and snack on frozen treats, talk to the locals and watch the moon rise up through the wires.
Wheaton and Sylvan Way. A geocache site of our hearts and my very weary soul.
Your WHMB
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