Nostalgia tends to get paved over

One of the indicators of growing older — aside from those joints that complain in the morning when you climb down the stairs — is losing your frame of reference.

You want to tell a story — some little anecdote — and you quickly find that your audience or compatriots don’t know what the heck you are talking about.

Sometimes it’s a historic event. Everyone over the age of 60 has had at least one moment when they were talking about the assassination of John F. Kennedy only to find that some of their listeners had not been born before 1963. Maybe their parents hadn’t been born by then.

Sometimes it’s a local landmark.

You’ll be gabbing away and mention the Key Theatre in Redkey or the Main in Dunkirk or the Hines in Portland, and you will be met with blank looks.

But if you get past those moments of embarrassment and the sudden reminder of how old you really are, sometimes you are met with curiosity.

Where was the Hines? Where the county parking lot is now just north of the courthouse. Where was the Main? Where the bank was in Dunkirk that Dru Hall is now cooking up entrepreneurial plans for. And the Key? Well, it’s still the Key, but it’s a blues club not a moviehouse anymore.

It almost becomes a game after awhile.

Toss out a name: Northport.

To people of a certain generation, that name evokes very specific memories of high school cruising in the 1950s and 1960s around a drive-in restaurant on the north side of Portland. Today, by my reckoning, it’s a section of asphalt in the parking lot for the abandoned Walmart building left behind when the Supercenter was built.

Another name: The Birdcage.

People under a certain age will give you that blank look or remember a movie with that title. Others will remember a sometimes rowdy and raucous venue for teen-age dances in downtown Redkey. The building’s still standing, but the music is just an echo these days.

Or try another: The Beehive.

That was a teen-oriented spot on Main Street in Portland in the early ’60s that could have served as a location for a dozen Hollywood movies. Soft drinks, high school romance and all the rest.

This local geography of nostalgia isn’t limited to adolescence. There are plenty of grown-up sites as well that have faded into memory.

As a kid, learning to read, I remember standing up in the backseat of the car — don’t tell the police — and reading neon signs. One of the first words I learned: liquor.

Bars were more plentiful in Jay County in those days, and perhaps their absence is a good thing.

But there was something alluring about them, something that — while a little seedy — wasn’t too far off from the charm of an English pub.

Three stand out in memory, though I only ventured into two of them as an adult.

The Shack made the biggest impression, though I never stepped over its threshold. It was a beer joint on Court Street, only a hop, skip and a jump from the courthouse. Metal siding covered its outside walls, and the siding was covered with garish paintings of pink elephants and other oddities.

Not far around the corner was the Cocktail Lounge. It had other names, but that was the name in neon.

And down the street a bit — under yet more neon — was Bill’s Big Bar. And I did cross that threshold more than once, usually after putting out the Saturday morning paper or while waiting for a jury to bring back a verdict.

Those are gone now, as gone as the Key and the Main and the Hines and the Birdcage and the Beehive and Northport.

The space taken up by The Shack is now part of a bank. The same holds true for the Cocktail Lounge. And Bill’s? It’s a parking lot these days.

That’s the trouble with nostalgia. In the end, the parking lots win.