I have been busy logging tape over the last couple of weeks, just finishing going through some footage I shot in August. After hearing the stories from my wife and her sister about the car rides they took as kids to their parents' old neighborhoods in Rochester, I knew that I wanted to go back there and experience it along with them. It had been a number of years since their last trip to Weld and Woodward Street, Hudson Ave., North and Scio Streets. In their day, these neighborhoods were poor, at times violent, with drugs becoming a growing problem. But they were nothing compared to what they are today. Many of the houses and buildings they remembered have been torn down, or are abandoned and neglected. If anything, drugs and violence are a bigger problem now, with poverty having grown as well.

Yet they did not lament the fact of change, even negative ones. To them it is just that, a fact. Sprinkled throughout the struggling spread of homes and businesses are those places that have been kept up, and the people who have stayed. They stick out even more amongst the depressed state of things around them. We stopped the car at one point and step out into the street and are greeted in Spanish by a woman who had just stepped out of her front door. She is hidden behind a mesh of fence, but my mother in law Lucy recognizes her immediately. Both she and my father in law, John, knew her from their years living here, though it has been more than a decade since they have spoken. She lives in the house where Lucy had last lived with her mother and several sibling before she was married. The house is a bit rundown and surrounded by rustic emphemera stacked about the yard, but in better care than some in the area. They converse in Spanish through the six or seven foot tall steel gate. She passes a few herbs from her garden over the top for us to take to our own garden. Her friendly demeanor reminds me of the people in Puerto Rico, the older generation that Lucy has spoken of, who always welcomed everyone, no matter who you were.

They spot another familiar face across the street and strike up a conversation with her. Then we are all invited inside the gate's confines to view the additions and subtractions to the house over the years. They reminisce for a bit, then make their extended farewells, the "Puerto Rican goodbye" as my wife often describes it.

We travel to the spot where my wife's parents first met. Only one of their original houses at the location still stands. My wife and I both have come to these neighborhoods in our jobs covering news stories, usually bad news. Shootings, stabbings and fires are common here and much of the area is worse for wear. It doesn't seem to reflect the positive memories that John and Lucy often speak of. But to them, this is just a sign of how time changes things, sometimes for the better, and sometimes not. 

Our encounter with the two old friends does remind me that not all is lost here. I think of our impending trip to Puerto Rico and what we will uncover as Lucy revisits a past that she tucked away more than two decades ago. It is bittersweet at times to revive bygone days in this way I suppose, and often,  it leads us to avoid a past that might otherwise edify our present.