...The more they stay the same

So back to the Kroger parking lot. Now, I have mixed feelings about change, but new technology I like. Before they tore down the old ball fields that used to be here, I google earth'd this place and printed off the map. The other day I printed off a current map, figured out where the baselines used to be, the dugouts, and the place where the ball went over the fence when I hit the only home run of my little leauge career. I even marked the parking space where I parked that old Buick my last two years of high school.

Armed with my overlapping maps and with an intrigued 8-year-old in tow, I wander around the parking lot. I point out the spots these things happened to my son. Somebody notices what I'm doing. Then someone else does. Pretty soon, I have a little following. A few know of the fields that once stood in this place. Some even set to finding the sites of long-ago personal victories...a game-winning strikeout on the pony leauge mound that was located somewhere under Aisle 6. One guy remembered being selected as an all-star at the old pavillion that was right about where Shane's is now. But to others...to my son...this place has never been anything but a strip mall parking lot. They didn't know what had transpired here before, that the sounds of this place weren't always cash registers and shopping carts, but the crack of heavy aluminum bats on balls, of parents arguing with umpires. They didn't know. How could they? There's no trace of the place this once was; no homage paid to that era...just neat rows of cars, a gas island, kicky little shops anchored by a nationally recognized grocer.

That's when it hit me...History isn't gone. It's not erased by the bulldozers when some big box store moves in. I will always have caught that line drive and stepped on the bag for that unassisted double play. That really happened, right over near where that fire hydrant in the pinestraw island is now. I will have always have parked that piece of junk Buick in the upper lot my senior year because I woke up late the day they handed out permits, in a space that was smack-dab in the middle of where Rival's Hot Dogs is today. I will always have dropped that ball in shallow right when I tripped over my own feet over where that cart return now stands. History is never gone...in this case it is, quite literally, buried by progress. The stories of the generations before are buried deeper still, their history pushed slightly underneath the progress of my generation. Someday today's Loganville will be nudged under as well, replaced by the so-called "needs" of a newer, bigger Loganville. Where Kroger is will eventually become where Kroger was.

Wheather or not Loganville "needs" more big box stores is up for debate...Everytime one of those big stores go up, we lose real small town charm and replace it with canned, marketable "small town feel" - whatever that is. Our humble little town has a rich and eventful history. We have often been poor stewards of our past. Sometimes all we have left are the stories, but the story of Loganville is worth telling. It becomes incumbent on us to tell the tales of the past, to never let "the way things were" cease to exist. I love hearing local tales of events before my time; I hope you enjoy my telling of the way it was before yours.

Bulldozers don't erase history...apathy does.

So take a good look around. Remember the way things are right now. Someday you might find yourself wandering around a parking lot with your kid, searching for landmarks to your past.