Things change. The Donut Shop at 1st and Pike went away well before I finished high school. I still haven't gotten over it. Penneys on 2nd and Pike also closed back then. All the creepy X-Rated theaters and sex shops on 1st Avenue left. The SROs and all the old sailors and dock workers that lived in them gone the way of the dinosaur. Richard Peterson no longer wanders the downtown with his trumpet, a beloved figure for so many of my generation. As a kid who traveled on the bus downtown to get lunch delivered via electric train at the old Iron Horse and to the old wax museum, the Zoo, the Seattle Center on weekends via Metro, etc., I could continue to list all the change. I abhor what Seattle has become.
That said, one loss puzzles me the most. For all of my childhood there were two things that
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marked the advent of warm weather and impending summer, the University District street fair in mid-May, and the Pike Place Market Street Fair which took place Memorial Day Weekend. I went every year into my 20s to one, the other or both. The U District still has their fair--May 16-17 this year. The Market's fair ended in 2008. According to the innertubes, the even ceased due to lack of money--which makes zero sense. There were many times I went and turned away because the goddammed even was so crowded it looked unenjoyable. Given the new waterfront park and the closing of car traffic on the road that the fair took place upon all those years, maybe the PDA will reconsider.
Quiet early mornings, the dog sleeping next to me, the near silence punctuated by birdsong are times that I feel the loss of Jenny most acutely. It's even I miss her presence most. We had so many lovely mornings, such sweetness and light can't be erased by urban renewal or time. The sense of loss is there, but really her absence feels more like I lost a limb. After the pain of the amputation fades, the pain remains, her missing presence as real as the pain from a phantom limb.
Tempus Fugit.
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