Memory Lane

At work, my team has monthly writing prompts. One of the prompts for November: What does Memory Lane look like? How do you get there?

I think a better question for me would be What isn’t Memory Lane? 

Memory lane is in my family’s house, where we moved in 2002 and my best friend lived in the ’90s. Memory lane is a walk around my downtown neighborhood because I’ve lived here since 1994. Memory lane is my carefully curated Pandora stations of ’90s hits

Let me show you around my house, and I can tell you about every family who has lived there since 1990 — and yes, I will critique their interior design choices. I’ll tell you about the professor who had model trains running around his study and built me an office in the carriage house so I could be a detective. I’ll show you all the places my dad remodeled and rebuilt the house when he worked as a contractor and about how the owner said, “Norm, you’d better do a good job because this will be your house someday.”

Take a walk downtown with me and I will talk your whole ear off about what businesses used to be there, how awesome First Night was when they held it downtown instead of at the dumb mall, and how Samuel Knight owned multiple mansions in Provo and most of Silver City (and if you want to go explore those ruins, hop in the truck and let’s go). And I’ll never let you forget that downtown is only newly awesome — and how impossible it was to find a summer job here when half the storefronts were vacant or barred.

Listen to the radio with me, and you’ll hear about the time my family went off-roading in Moab and it was the first time I heard “Every Day Is a Winding Road” by Cheryl Crow. I’ll tell you about the time I pulled my best friend out of the wave pool while “Crash Into Me” by the Dave Matthews Band played over the loudspeakers or about the time my sister and I took all the sugar packets from our table at Denny’s and ate them in the backseat of the car and danced to “Free Falling” by Tom Petty. If “Green Onions” by Booker T. comes on, I’ll remember doing yard work and planting vegetables and how our house always smelled like sawdust.

So what’s Memory Lane?

Everything.