DREAMS OF HOME

The earliest memory I have that I know is a "true" memory—one not fabricated from the stories of others or from old photographs or home movies and then believed to be a memory—is of a streetcleaner going by in the early dawn light near the house I lived in on Trenton Avenue in Bremerton, Washington when I was three years old. That memory was triggered this morning as I watched a streetcleaner go by in the early dawn light near the house in which I currently reside. The wife asked me what I was doing. I told her I was watching the streetcleaner go by because I found it soothing and enjoyable, which was, and is, true.

When I wandered around Bremerton two weeks ago, the town in which I grew up, similar memories were stirred by landmarks present and absent. I was taken back to my childhood, my teenage years, my years as a young adult. I wandered by the storefront that once was Harbor Books—a favorite hangout of mine when my brother or sister were taking swimming lessons at the long-demolished YMCA. Thinking of Harbor Books brought a flood of wonderful book associations with the space: browsing and then buying H.P. Lovecraft tomes; picking up the latest Dungeons & Dragons and Traveller modules; looking through the maps and discount books in the loft; buying books by Stephen King, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker.

I passed the old Bremer's building, once the department store of downtown Bremerton, and Kitsap County. I passed the corner where Woolworth's with its soda fountain and lunch counter used to stand, now fenced in and claimed in a land grab by Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. I passed the places where the record store and tattoo parlor and the Roxy and Admiral theaters stood.

The dream of Bremerton-past shimmered and then faded. Sepia tone gave way to now: the steel frames of condominiums-under-construction on the waterfront, the new Kitsap Federal Credit Union building, the Kitsap Conference Center, the Bremerton Transportation Center, the Norm Dicks Government Building. Streets that you could park on at will now require that you leave after two hours, not to return to the same street on the same day! The streets of the dream give way to the streets of today, the same streetcleaner driving down both, a small boy and an adult watching and remembering and dreaming...