COLUMN: A road trip down memory lane

The sign reads, "Welcome to Leominster, MA." Perhaps my astigmatism was acting up, but I could have sworn it said, "Welcome to 1993." And as I drove through, I began to doubt myself again. Perhaps the words really were, "Welcome to the Past: Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Return." Lo so many years ago, Johnny Appleseed was born in Leominster. And that's it for the history lesson. Today, Leominster is a plastic town, the birthplace of the pink lawn flamingo and other much less popular maliciously glowing lawn ornaments aimed to clutter up your frontage. Leominster is a blue collar town of factories -- at best half-heartedly open, at worst, cold-heartedly shut down -- and of plastic dreams, fragile and easily discarded. But it's all in the past as my parents moved to New Hampshire the week I arrived for freshman orientation. While I was home for Passover last weekend, I drove down to Leominster and looked around and came back home happy to have seen a friend, but my drive home was full of gloom, as if I had really seen the city for the first time. Minus the friendship and abandon of high school, that place you grew up in becomes so bleak you can almost watch the tumbleweeds roll through. Cities like Leominster don't offer many entertainment options so my friend and I went out to the pool hall off of Mechanic Street. For you, loyal reader, that hangout may have been a warmly neonized bowling alley, a classic old movie house or a real quality diner, like Skip's Blue Moon over in Gardner. Go back now and see memories fade before your eyes. At Scott's Billiards, duct tape has overtaken green felt as both a utilitarian necessity and as a badly misconceived decorative strategy. The jukebox still thrives on vintage Aerosmith songs and when Guns-N-Roses' "Sweet Child of Mine" came on the radio, the crowd -- surely, I said to myself, I was never so young, so callow, so grungy -- sings along as if they request the song every night. The man behind the counter, who may or may not be Scott, hands me a tray of chipped pool balls and apologizes because the cue ball clearly hasn't been virgin white in years. You may have eaten nightly at that diner or at an IHOP, Denny's or Stuckey's. For me, Friendly's is the place. I recognize the waitresses who have been there for years but I'm interchangeable to them, just another person who vanished or got away. But the ones who never escaped still cling to their booths like spilled eggs or a pasty leatherette epoxy. My high school valedictorian sitting at a table, coffee to his right, the local newspaper to his left. He has the news of the class -- everybody's come out of the closet, everybody's pregnant, everybody's on drugs. At least nobody's dead. A guy one class ahead of me is running for mayor next year and three of my friends are already substituting at the high school. Mobility isn't necessarily a virtue and that's fortunate because I know many people for whom it isn't a strong suit. The town mostly, though, remains the same. There's a new Barnes and Noble. And on any given day the traffic is far greater at the new Appelbee's next door. And the hotel where my family stayed when we were looking for a place to live has gone through five different chain owners before becoming a managed care facility. But otherwise, I'm sure the place is the same as I left it. I guess I returned last weekend because amidst my fears of graduation and future employment I knew Leominster would provide familiarity. Instead, I got a lesson on the need to grow up and move on. I wonder why I never learned before.