When I go on vacation, I will sometimes stop in the town (Havana, Ill.)where I worked for nine years as a radio announcer and try to catch up with local affairs. In 1998, it had been 10 years since I'd left. Here are those reflections.

As I travel a familiar road,
a place from another world emerges.
In some ways, it's the same,
so many faces never change.

All the old cabins are gone,
the broken concrete and jagged rocks
give way to finished wood and
tourists stopping along the way.

Old friends are grayer or gone,
and Main Street seems frozen
like a rrd brick motif,
a Victorian street scene with
high-tech people penciled in.

Old friends are grayer, or gone
and what is left is a place for antiques if it is threre at all.

But all seems well.