Most of the folks I know who once lived in and around my corner of Northern Virginia are now gone. They're either elsewhere or very very elsewhere, as moves and mortality take their toll. I'll drive past the street where a high school girlfriend once lived, or the cul de sac that a now-deceased friend from middle school called home, and encountering those physical locations will stir my creaky neurons to remembrance.
So much isn't what it was. Where familiar haunts once stood, there are now new developments, as the endless American cycle of diaspora, destruction, and regrowth grinds memory to dust.
Like, say, the multiplex theater where I went with my wife on our very first date. It had, itself, replaced a drive-in theater, and it was a bustling thriving nexus of the local film-going experience...back when human beings went places to see films. It's long gone now, replaced by a thrumming insta-city.
Before we went to see Dead Poets Society on that date night years ago, I'd taken her to dinner at a little Vietnamese place where my family were regulars. I'd sussed that she was vegetarian, and I knew there was a solid tofu option on the menu, so there we went. Cha Gio closed decades ago now, replaced by another restaurant under different management.
But the tiny, slightly dumpy strip mall it inhabited remained, awkwardly sited at the crossroads of Graham and Route 50. It housed pupuserias and bodegas and a beauty supply store, but it was clearly not thriving. The pandemic had killed off the largest tenant, a sprawling Chinese place that my parents would take the boys to when they were little. Harvest Moon...or "The Rice House," as the boys called it...had itself taken the place of my parents steakhouse of choice. Back in the 1970s, that box of a building housed one of their prime Friday night date-night locales. "We'll be at the Black Angus," or so Dad would announce portentously to the sitter, because calling the restaurant landline would be the only way to reach them in an emergency. The place had a dance floor, where Dad and Mom would spend a wide-lapeled seventies evening of dinner and dancing.
For special occasions, we'd get to go there too. I remember once, when both sets of grandparents were visiting, getting out on the floor and dancing with my grandmother. It's an old sepia memory, more a series of sense impressions than a full recollection. But when I drive to see Mom, that memory returns regularly when I pass the long-closed building.
The other night, as I drove her back from an evening at our place, we noticed that the whole strip mall was suddenly closed. In between my picking Mom up and returning her, construction fences had been erected. The parking lot was now empty. Every storefront, boarded up. The Latino food truck that's done business there for years had decamped across the way to the parking lot of a laundromat.
At some point, I'll come up over the rise to approach the intersection, and there'll be nothing there but rubble.
So it goes, as Vonnegut would say.
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