Are these the last days of my Memphis? It is a big thought. There were some years when all I could think of is coming back here. I was off in the Arizona desert looking back to these trees. I was cast away in the rainforest of Alaska and all I ever wanted was a cardboard cutout of Elvis and a spot in the bleachers at the Liberty Bowl.

This Memphis is not my Memphis; it is no longer the city I once knew. Long gone are the walls to places I knew not to go. There are no pockets of safe harbor; there is nowhere I feel safe. Bartlett has fallen and is now overrun by the Walking Dead. There is no Bartlett. Memphis is consistent with cultural behavior that promotes criminals and chides those who rail against evil. There are a lot of frogs stewing in boiling pots around here.

It is more than that; it is more than the places I once worked, played and loved are now places where people steal, kill and destroy. It is in the simple things, really. It is in the marginal things. Take for example, the Pink Palace Museum renaming itself the MOSH pit or whatever and its moving the Piggly Wiggly exhibit to another space. There was no need to do that. It had been there my entire childhood and I am assuming into my 40s. Ironically, folks now in charge don't heed history and it is consistent that it is head up by somebody not from Memphis—oh, Rhodes and its ever-present bubble!

People are always telling you that change is a good thing. But all they're really saying is that something you didn't want to happen at all...has happened...In fact, someone, some foolish person, will probably think it's a tribute to this city, the way it keeps changing on you, the way you can never count on it, or something. I know because that's the sort of thing I'm always saying. But the truth is...I'm heartbroken. I feel as if a part of me has died, and my mother has died all over again, and no one can ever make it right.

-You've Got Mail

I reach the point where I recognize everything in this present age with Memphis is Them. It is not me. I come from a different time, the '80s and '90s Memphis, a time of the Mall of Murder, the Woolworth's and Walgreens of the Raleigh Springs Mall, a marbled and clean Oak Court Mall, the hidden mall behind that Pizza Inn on Summer, the shining Hickory Ridge Mall, the exotic Wolfchase Galleria and the curiousities of the Factory Outlet Mall—I still remember making purchases at its simple cassette store, like these Michael W. Smith songs, Place in this World and I Will Be Here for You.

Those old songs, cassettes that seem fresh and shiny in my mind's eye, feel nostalgic to me. And then I look in the mirror, "Graying facial hair—what is THAT?" I see it and it serves as a receipt to the knowledge, wisdom and stature I have gained and the amount I paid to put them in my library. It is a memorial of all the deaths in my life and the loss of people who remain alive. I hold those cassettes up with 13-year-old hands and innocently think my neighborhood will never change and I will always have my folks—I'm totally looking forward to those flying cars and that space station they're going to build!

I think the older I get, the more I plainly see how things are going to fail: cars, houses, governments and people. I want to be optimistic, I want to have that mindset that I could have any car I wanted if I were just willing to buy an older model. Instead, I am relegated to considering the odometer on plumbing and knees.

Seasons change with the scenery
Weaving time in a tapestry
Won't you stop and remember me
At any convenient time?
Funny how my memory skips while looking over manuscripts
Of unpublished rhyme

-Paul Simon, Hazy Shade of Winter