They say you can't go home again.
I've become haunted by this proverb. In my case I can go home again. Dundalk, MD is home, it's where I grew up. But it no longer feels like home. I don't live in Dundalk anymore, but I live close enough that I can visit when I get the itch to return to something familiar. Most of the food joints I ate at while growing up are long gone. The McDonald's I worked at on Wise Avenue--just across the street from my house--before my senior year in high school (summer 1995) was razed and rebuilt. Now, it's a box, an ugly box with no soul or character that is utterly unwelcoming. In the '80s and '90s the mansard-roof McDonald's restaurant wanted families to stay in and eat; but today, they practically demand you get your food and promptly leave. They don't want you there. In fact, they'd appreciate if you use the drive-thru, or better yet, get it delivered for another 5 bucks and just stay home altogether.
This can be the flip side of nostalgia. The things I took for granted while growing up are the things I look forward to from the displacement of several decades. The Pizza Hut (my second job, 1994) was demolished and turned into a bank. The Dennys my friend Dan worked at was demo'd and turned into a carwash. Dundalk's 10th carwash... Our Friendly's just closed, as well, recently. Me and the Cone Head sundae go way back at that Friendly's.
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| Merritt Blvd. |
The Key Bridge, which you could see from many spots all around Dundalk, collapsed due to a Singapore freighter spearing one of the bridge's supports like it was Goldberg last March. You could see the spiney humpback of the bridge from all over town. It felt like our bridge. I traversed the Key Bridge countless times. When it is finally rebuilt, in probably 10 years, it will be a different bridge sitting out there in the Patapsco in the distance. The strangeness will continue here at home.
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| The Key Bridge after collapse |
Most of my family and friends have all left Dundalk. My parents headed to south Pennsylvania, like my aunts and uncles and cousins before them. My grandmother left just before she passed away. I enjoyed my weekly trips to Dundalk to pick her up and take her out for groceries. Now the Mars supermarkets that I would take her two, both of them, are gone.
I had several jobs in Eastpoint Mall in the late '90s. Electronics Boutique in 1997. Then I was hired with Saturday Matinee/Record Town shortly after. And in September I was hired at Halloween Adventure. I even continued to work at McDonald's across the street on North Point Boulevard... I had myriad part-time jobs to keep me busy. The mall was incredibly vibrant then, with music stores, bookstores, toy stores, and two arcades. It was alive with people and families shopping. Looking back from 2026 I'd say it was a slice of heaven.
When I go to Eastpoint Mall today, which is seriously rare, it's a ghost town. Even the knock-off product marquees have closed down. My pessimistic outlook for Eastpoint is that it will shutter before 2030. Extremely sad for a place i grew up in... Walking in Eastpoint today reminds me of Rust Cohle. This place is like somebody's memory of a mall, and the memory is fading. It's like there was never anything here but drywall.
Like almost everything today in the world, going back to Dundalk these days feels...weird. It feels off. Like something changed, some undefinable thing that makes everything feel different. Whether it was 2012 or the pandemic, my life, my world, feels like two different pieces of the same life. Before and after. If an agent walked up to me and removed his glasses and told me that this was all a computer simulation, I would no longer be surprised. If a Mayan chieftain crawled out of the bushes and said, in perfect English, that the world ended in 2012 and this is just a death echo, a memory of your dying planet, "I told you so," I would shake my head and go back to whatever the hell I was doing.
Change is good. Well, it's supposed to be. What's that other proverb? The only constant in life is change... But is this what getting old feels like? Is it only pain and misery? Is it all nostalgia for the past and an impossible dream to return? I feel like Rip Van Winkle, who slept and left home behind, stuck in a future that is cold and vapid and lonely. This isn't the change I had hoped for.
*Agents, if you're out there, reading my thoughts and listening to my pleas, then please put me back in. I'd take the blue pill over this existence. Ignorance is blissful peace. Please reset the clock and plug me back in. I'm ready to go home again.
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