EVERYONE HAS AN "OLD NEIGHBORHOOD"

There's an "old neighborhood" in everyone's life....!

When you visit it, a lot of things may seem different. The yards appear smaller than you remember...the trees and lawns look older...the streets have more parked cars...some of the homes and stores are gone.

And yet, in the realm of memory which often acts like a cure for death, not one blade or branch, not one school yard or candy store is really gone. Everything remains exactly in place. Like the last day you left it.
They say memory means we can have roses in the winter. Likewise, memory can preserve the "old neighborhood" as clearly as any treasure housed in any museum.

Back in that sweet-used-to-be of our youth, there existed homes and playing fields and houses of worship that no map can locate. Yet our memories of them are more than sentimentality. They're an efficacious force in our life, because they give it thrust.

With all its limitations, the "old neighborhood" was where we discovered the love of parents, the support of friends, the values of good and evil, the visions that carried us from childhood to adulthood. The "old neighborhood" is a sacred place. Not to be eulogized, but from which to be energized. Roots count. Yesterdays count. In a sunrise society like ours, we usually say the future is always greater than the past. And yet....

And yet our personal pasts are the steadfast shoulders upon which we stand in order to see our dreams for that future. So whether your "old neighborhood" is Hyde Park or Rogers Park, Gage Park or Pilsen, Douglas or Austin, Wrigleyville or Wicker Park, Oak Park or Maywood, don't think of it as a graveyard of yesteryears. More as a gateway of years yet to be.

Some of us know this for an enduring. You see, our childhood memories are tiny time machines that carry us back to exactly the way it was. Precisely the way we were. And that's becomes more than nostalgia and sentimentality. It becomes power and possibility...!