Hollowed Beginnings

He overlooked the city from one of the many parks and felt a sense of melancholic nostalgia at what he saw. Although it didn’t look that different from how he remembered it, it was only once he went down into the streets that he realized how much of it had changed since his last visit.
 He took his fiancée with him on a walk through his old neighbourhood, stopping by his old elementary school first. The old, red-brick building now replaced by some structure resembling a prison rather than a school. The jungle gyms and monkey bars replaced by much safer contraptions. Even in his own time the old wooden structures that dotted the playground were gradually replaced by more modern-for the time-plastic ones—which were much less fun to play on. He recounted to his fiancée about how one large, wooden playground structure that was replete with a slide, stairs, a fireman’s pole, and a rope wall, was rumoured to have had a child fall to their death from there. For children, the height would have been quite intimidating but not lethal. As they left the school behind, he was reminded how the school administrators had introduced some strange program to train the children to be nicer by bribing them with citations of friendliness, which could be exchanged for candy. He had received a few when the program was first introduced, enough for some candy, but he never redeemed them out of principle. He thought the whole thing strange at the time and that it gave the students a pusillanimous reputation.
 A little ways away from his elementary school was the rival elementary school, at least what remained of it. One walled-section of the school that remained standing had a flight of stairs, a wide slide, but no door. He explained that there was a rumour that the door was removed because one day a student had run out of the school through that door, and, not noticing the slide, tripped on said slide and died. Nonsensical, but he did remember it frightened his sister when they were young, which amused him. That made two rumours now involving a child dying. He thought it better not to bring up any further examples.
 The commercial sectors had all but been replaced with homogeneous apartment complexes containing street level storefronts. The local groceries stores were gone, replaced by a corporate store. He then remembered that one teacher took them on a field trip in the second grade to visit all the local grocery stores in the area. The trip consisted of recording the prices offered by each store for various foodstuffs. The teacher in question was Jewish and he seemed to wander from one school to another. It wasn’t until in high school that a student from another school mentioned he also had the same teacher, and also experienced the teacher’s irrational hate for Christmas.
 Now that he mentioned high school a new wave of memories come flooding back. His high school was fairly average, nothing too remarkable about it. It didn’t have the same problems that some of the other schools did. In his time it was rare to see any Indian students, but nowadays there were whole high schools full of them. The Indian students from those days would form a small ‘gang’, as it were, with their cousins to fight students from other schools; but nowadays, there were so many of them, and from what he heard, they would now fight amongst each other instead of against the natives. A bit of violence between students seems inevitable and natural, but this current state of things seemed out of control in his opinion.
 The main street had changed significantly since his youth. Despite being relatively dangerous, it was the street for seeing a music show. The kind of street that had unmarked bars and shows that were invite only, requiring a guy who knew a guy. All that; gone. The venues on the outside were the same, but internally everything was run by the same corporate group that manages most other pubs and venues in the city. The establishments only paid lip service to their heritage, while turning away no one. The seedier areas of the city had only gotten worse from what he was told by old acquaintances. He thought it better not to visit those areas, at least not with this fiancée. If he could, he would choose to never visit the city again.