[ WP ] You 're back home for the first time in years . This is where you grew up . It seems like the more things change , the more they stay the same .

It was a late winter afternoon when I walked up to the old seafood restaurant. The sun hung over the too wide and too straight road out front like I always remembered, but something about it seemed wetter and yellower than before. For years this was the place where everyone went to eat with their families after their shift at the factory or the plant or the mill or the smeltery. 
 
 It was a sprawling two story building with walls of wet brown shingles. The second floor was smaller than the first floor and stood like a tower. I never knew what was up there. Still do n't. Probably just a glorified storage shack and where the cooks do their blow. 
 
 Now hard figures lingered outside, wrinkled faces with their Members Only jackets and 30 year old haircuts. The dads of ages gone by. They sucked in their cigarettes in with their chests as they looked off to nowhere in particular. 
 
 The air here used to feel like sand. A car assembly plant, a steel mill, a plastics manufacturer, chemical plants and an asphalt mixery used to fill the air here with fumes that could almost choke the life from your lungs. But somehow it smelled like home. Now the only smell that blew in was the brackish odor of the tar from the asphalt plant. 
 
 I walked past two women arguing in the local tinny drawl as I entered the door. Ronny stood at the decades old host's pulpit like he swore he'd be. 
 
 `` Mark!'' he shouted as I walked in the door. 
 
 `` Hey buddy! Good to see you!'' 
 
 Mark came out from behind his station to give me the biggest hug I'd ever had from him. `` I'm sure you love California, but life's been quiet here without you bro.'' 
 
 I knew he was referring to his life minus one of his best and wildest friends, but I could n't help but thinking he meant the restaurant. Three quarters of the tables were empty and neatly set. Ten years ago at that time of day, every table would have been seated while waiters all but ran between them with trays filled with crab cakes, raw oysters, rockfish, and bushels of crabs. The only thing that remained of that old scene was the odor of seafood and Old Bay that permeated the wood of which that house was built. 
 
 The few people who were here were mostly old and had probably been eating here for decades. 
 
 We chatted for a few minutes before I said, `` What's with the wax museum dude?'' 
 
 Ronny looked hurt. `` What do you mean?'' 
 
 `` Everyone here is old.'' 
 
 `` So what?'' 
 
 `` I do n't know. It's just... weird I guess.'' 
 
 I do n't remember most of the argument that followed. I remember that it was loud. I remember that before I stormed off Ronny said, `` Well not all of us can run away to California like you! We might not be shiny but we're real!'' 
 
 What I remember more than the argument was that almost no one in the nearly silent dining room looked up from their meals to see the fracas at the door. Everyone just silently ate. And that was why I left five years ago.
