There are places I remember

Recently I walked through the Prudential Center shopping arcade toward Boylston Street and passed Brentano's Bookstore, and the branch office of my bank, the Provident Institution for Savings. No wait, I thought, this is 2008 - they're long gone.

Down on the sidewalk, I looked across the street and saw The Bulkie restaurant, Cramer Electronics, Paul's Mall, and Jazz Workshop, and just to the right, the Brodney Gallery, specializing in antique jewelry. You don't see them? Right, I know - they're gone too.

On and on down Boylston: Guild Drug at one corner of Exeter Street, and BU's College of Basic Studies on the diagonal corner, between the Hotel Lenox and the library. Ken's Restaurant at Copley, Cokesbury Bookstore, Peck & Peck, the Book Clearing House, and Thayer McNeil Shoes.

And the people. I glance up Exeter Street to No. 88 and see in memory my terribly sick father sitting in a lawn chair on the stoop, waiting for me to come home from school. But no, that yellow brick house is a Marriott boutique hotel.

We hear the gloomy voices deplore the young's ignorance of history, and we think and worry about memory loss in ourselves and loved ones. But another curious phenomenon as we get older - which no one warns us about - is the tenacious web of memory for objects, incidents, and people that increasingly surrounds us and won't leave us alone. Especially if we've lived in one place all our lives, everywhere we look we see things as they used to be.

Later, on the subway (not called the Red Line, just the Ashmont-Harvard Line), I board the greenish old train with windows you can open, hold overhead the white porcelain handle, and see in the dark tunnel the reflected face of a pimply adolescent. I blink and the face is deeply furrowed with gray whiskers.

I go to a night game at Fenway Park and see the cloud of cigarette smoke rising from the grandstand against the lights and the Three Monks wine billboard poking up beyond center field, and hear John Kiley playing the organ. I look at the $45 price on my ticket, turn to the younger person next to me and say, "You know, I remember when bleacher seats were $1, the grandstand was $2.50, and the expensive box seats were $5."

He looks at me with patient indifference and says, "Oh yeah?", then turns back to watch the next pitch.

It dawns on me with horror that I sound just like one of those denizens of a bygone age who fastens like the Ancient Mariner on a young person, quite sure that the memories rattling around in his brain must be as interesting to the listener as they are to him. He doesn't know what a bore he is. The listener thinks, "Right, Gramps, I know - things aren't the way they used to be."

Often we are interested in elders' memory of historic events that we're curious about for other reasons; the Depression, say, or World War II - or Ted Williams's last home run. I was fascinated that my mother remembered the World War I victory parade on Beacon Street, and the North End molasses flood of 1919, which killed 21 people, and that she always objected when it was treated as a joke. "It was not funny," she said, "it was a horror. The smell hung in the streets for years."

The young listener is right, of course: The next pitch is what matters. Most of the thicket of stuff clogging our brains is of no importance to our present and matters not a bit to someone else. It interests us because change in our lives is a proof of time. I might not feel much different from my past self, but if that orange MTA (sic) car I used to take is now on display, like Lenin's corpse, in Boylston Station, that means I can't be that far from a shunt myself.

None of this is to say that the stuffed scrapbook of the past is ridiculous to add and hang on to, as long as we don't yammer on about the details. They're just part of who we are. And they give a gift that can be appreciated, such as when we look at an old movie of someone like 84-year-old Lauren Bacall, who looks every bit of her age. "What a knockout she was," we think, and then, "That beauty is all still there - it must be, just under the luggage of the years."