Some places, some people stay with us for as long as we live

"There are places I remember all my life, though some have changed. Some forever not for better, some have gone and some remain."

We all have places we remember fondly, places we will remember all our lives even though some of them no longer exist. My friend Mick will never forget a crummy youth baseball field, poorly kept up in the best of times, that was his dream field from 1965-69.

These days it's the parking lot of an office building, but when he looks closely enough, he can see the bases, the fences and the backstop. I'm sure he wishes he had brought a camera back then and taken some pictures.

My grandmother is at lower left, my grandfather lower right, in 1920.

The places that hide deep in my heart are hundreds of miles farther west. I've written about them before. Most of them are in the small Ohio town where my mother was born, where my grandparents lived almost all of their long lives. The last time I set foot in their house was the day in 1990 that we buried my grandmother next to my grandfather, who had died nearly five years earlier.

It was a small house, three bedrooms and one bath, built in 1918 and listed at 576 square feet. It always seemed big enough, though. My cousin Peter, who is maybe five years younger than I am, said it perfectly that day. "We had so many happy times in this house and now we'll probably never set foot in it again."

My earliest memories of my grandfather are from when I was five or six, which would have put him just past 60. In the above picture, taken on his wedding day, he was 24. He has been gone for nearly 30 years, and I will be 65 on my next birthday. There is something very strange to me about all that.

The second picture is from 1985, when we were all in Ohio for my grandfather's funeral. I blew it up as large as I could to show faces. I wish I had other pictures of my grandmother, who is top center in the picture with my parents to her left and my uncle and his wife to the right.

But the main reason I used the picture is the view it shows of my grandparents' house, where at least until I was 13 or so was the single place in the world where I have the most happy memories. I had been there four months before this picture, stopping by to see my grandparents on the way back to my home in St. Louis after a vacation.

The house had sort of an old-fashioned porch, where you could sit out and enjoy the cooling temperature of the evening. I remember my grandfather sitting in a lawn chair and listing to Ernie Harwell broadcasting the Tigers games on WJR from Detroit.

He had sort of lost interest in the Cleveland Indians, who hadn't been in the World Series since 1954 and who could generally be found near the bottom of the American League. That was when my grandfather taught me that the most important pitch in baseball is Strike One; I must have heard him complain a hundred times about pitchers who fell behind in the count before throwing a strike.

It really is funny the things we remember. Four of the people in that picture are no longer alive, and at least two others are no longer part of our extended family. But what fills me with the most nostalgia is looking at my younger brother and my three younger sisters. Three of the four of them were still in their twenties. They look so young and so happy.

I also see a fourth generation in there -- my cousin David's children -- and I know the little kids in the picture are now grown with children of their own.

Memories do last. They really do.

"Though I know I'll never lose affection for people and things that went before. I know I'll often stop and think about them ..."
-- IN MY LIFE, Lennon/McCartney