Hometowns change more than we care to admit

Hometowns change more than we care to admit

David Trinko dtrinko@limanews.com - 11.12.2007
For most of my life, I was convinced nothing ever changed in Arlington. Something tells me other folks think the same of their hometowns.
Arlington is a small village like so many others in the region — close-knit, focused on its school and boasting a handful of home-grown businesses.
For the first 21 years of my life, that two-stoplight town in Hancock County was home. To some degree, that friendly town with 1,351 people remains home. My parents still live in that two-story house across from the fire station. People driving by still wave when I cross the street there.
The football team’s always good. The garbage bags sit outside every Friday morning. And warm summer nights are always interrupted by children screaming as they dive into the village-run swimming pool.
There are 43 boys, freshmen through seniors, on the Red Devils’ football team this year, which is pretty impressive since there are only 87 boys in the 10th, 11th and 12th grades in the high school.
I’m beginning to wonder if nostalgia might be holding Arlington and places like it back, though.
The world does change, even if we won’t allow it in our minds.
The Ford dealership closed years ago. There’s no proof left of the old Allis-Chalmers dealer, as grass covers where those tractors once sat. The pharmacy and hardware store each moved to smaller locations.
There is progress, even in a small town.
The football team made the playoffs for the first time this year. The Red Devils are playing Ada at Lima Stadium on Saturday for the regional championship. It’s a new honor for the smallest school in Ohio to win 500 games, a new plateau for a school that ranks 31st in the state in all-time victories.
There’s finally a steady pizza place in town, as Jack-n-Do’s Pizza from Findlay settled into the north side of town.
And there’s plenty of new housing popping up all over town. Fields that once raised wheat, soybeans and corn are home to a crop of young families now.
That swimming pool with the screaming kids is different from the one I used as a youth. They completely tore it up and rebuilt it while I was at college.
Even the people running the schools change. I see from the school’s Web site that only 10 of my teachers are still out there, and I don’t recognize any of the administrators’ names. I do recognize some school board and village council members’ names, but that’s because I went to school with some of them.
I’ve been out of that “red brick prison,” as we called it, longer than I was ever in it.
There has to come a time when you realize your nostalgic view of a place isn’t necessarily reality.
I worry that a proposed new school there failed last week for this very reason.
When I heard they wanted a half-percent income tax 7.9 mill bond issue to build a new school, I’d bet I reacted the same way everyone else did. I thought, “The school’s not in that bad of shape.”
That’s how nostalgia hits you. I didn’t think about the classes in the old locker room beneath the old gym. I didn’t consider how poorly heated or cooled some of those classrooms were back in the day. Instead, I reacted with, “If it was good enough for me, it’s good enough for them.”
I didn’t react with the reality I haven’t wandered those halls in more than a dozen years.
The reality is those kids don’t attend the same school I did. They don’t live in the same town where I grew up.
In that way, Arlington is a small village like so many others in the region — full of people who won’t accept that time changes everything.