Landmarks: Light and dark

By JoAnne Young

I’m headed up North 27^th Street on some big box shopping trip and even before I hit that certain block, the one before the long overpass, it happens. It always happens. 

The memory flood. 

I barely have to look as I pass it; if I did I wouldn’t see it anyway. It’s not there. 

Instead of the landmark I have held in my head for decades, there stands a Lincoln Water System building, long and white and blue. 

No matter. What I conjure is the white house someone built on that land decades ago, and inside it a staircase with a wooden railing that I leaned on when I got a first kiss from a young man. A first kiss that would tie me to that staircase and that house and that block on North 27^th for decades to come. 

That’s how it is with landmarks, those touchpoints in our lives, in this town or another, that burn themselves into our personal stories and remain.

I lived in this town through college, then other towns, and eventually the young man and I returned with three little ones. I planted myself in a journalism career, he in broadcasting, as we marched through two decades of work and parenting, with the accompanying PTA meetings, seventh-grade band concerts, and many an hour as gym rats. 

Time brings plenty of life-affirming landmarks: houses, schools, parks, neighborhoods, grocery stores. 

It can also bring darker ones that naturally manifest from 35 years of reporting. I’ll burden you with a few. 

In 1992, an 18-year-old university student, Candi Harms, was returning home from an evening visiting her boyfriend when she was stalked, kidnapped, tortured and killed in a chill-soaked field outside Lincoln. 

And so a couple of my landmarks, albeit shadowy ones, are the bungalow where one of her killers lived at the time on South 52^nd Street, and the apartment parking lot at 61^st and Vine streets where her life took its horrible turn. When I pass them I think of that young woman with so much life ahead of her. 

There are others: 

* An area on the Antelope Creek bike path just blocks from my house, a storm-drainage tunnel under 48th Street that I cannot walk through without thinking of the teen who was beaten, stabbed and buried there by another teen who lived in a group home two blocks the other way from my home.

* A16-acre enclave of aging mobile homes, buttressed by commercial buildings on busy North 27th Street and the city's wastewater treatment plant. Home – at least it was 15 years ago -- to low-income people, immigrants, elderly men and women seeking refuge from high rent, written leases and security deposits. I replay that story each trip by. 

* The old, sometimes musty smelling, Lincoln Public Schools District Office, where I walked halls and sat hours upon hours at school board meetings, and in particular at the round table in the office of Associate Superintendent Marilyn Moore for engaging talks about student issues. A new, not musty smelling building sits there now. But I will always see the pre-May 30, 2011, rambling LPSDO stalwart, and then the smoldering burnt-to-the-ground remains of it. Superintendent Steve Joel called it a “total loss.” Not from my mind.

I'll leave you with one more, a bittersweet landmark that combines the news side with the personal. One also given up in heat and flames, and remembered in vivid detail.

The memories of Ideal Grocery, another 27th Street marker, where I would grab one of those vintage wire carts and walk familiar aisles -- I can recreate them almost perfectly -- picking out breads, pastas, cookies, and fruits and vegetables placed in paper sacks that assistants would then weigh and mark. The visit would end at those old-style check-out counters and friendly clerks. 

It's been four years since those beloved visits ended with that fire, and I still catch myself once in a while thinking, "I'll just can head over to Ideal. Oh ... wait."  

For good, bad or ugly, these places remain in my history and my memory. They delight or they haunt. 

But they matter.