I took a shortcut Friday afternoon from my office to my barber shop that took me through an industrial area where I used to spend a lot of time.
I hadn’t been on that part of Oxmoor Road in Homewood for about 15 years. Several of the printing companies I used to deal with — when I was a political consultant — are located in the area, so I was flooded with memories of late-night visits to do press-checks on mail pieces for my clients.
I printed dozens of jobs at Craftsman Printing right over there. Across from them was the old building where PressTech used to be before the owner — a man who did me more favors than I can count — unexpectedly killed himself on the press floor late one night.
My memory was flooded with faces and images and sensations of my time in the area. Part of me enjoyed the sweetly bitter sensation of experiencing a past which is now dead, but another part of me wanted to leave the area and never return. And then I had a sudden thought.
Memory Lane is a one-way street — and it’s a dead end.

We’re neither friends nor enemies, just strangers who share the past
Society needs storytellers to help make sense of a changing world
My bad teen poetry suggests I’ve always hungered for missing love
How can you help someone who doesn’t really want to keep living?
Does this look like a child abuser? Voters must not have thought so
From hole I’ve fallen into today, world is a very alienating place
Buggy WordPress plugin knocked site off the air for about 36 hours
Town’s new fine for public profanity points to problem of ‘public’ spaces