Dayton, Ohio, was an interesting place to grow up.

Mind you, I grew up in the suburbs, in a little place called Huber Heights. But it was so close to Dayton that the city overshadowed everything. Most of the jobs were there. Huber Heights was just a place for the blue-and-white collar folks to come home to.

Then the eighties hit, and it was like there was a change on the wind. The jobs started going away. The last big factories shut their doors, and we started losing corporations. For a while there, Dayton was a solid part of the rustbelt. That lasted through the nineties... but for me it was just business as usual.

When I was growing up my Dad used to take me to fun places. We'd go shop at the Salem Mall every month or so. Sometimes he'd haul me to gun shows and computer shows at Hara Arena, and when the weather was good on a weekend we'd go to the flea maket out at the North Dixie Drive in. Sure, the surrounding areas were places you didn't want to be at night, but those trips? Those were joy.

Salem Mall had the best Waldenbooks around, and a KB toys with tons of neat stuff. Sometimes I'd find D&D sets there! Though I couldn't afford their prices, occasionally I'd find one that some jerk had opened, and quietly flip through the books, trying to understand the rules. I never opened the boxes myself, mind you. That would have been wrong.

The flea market was huge and riotous, with tons of people mingling, and random stuff filling groaning tables. I hoarded my meager allowance and hunted roleplaying games, board games, and old Avalon Hill bookcase games with determined fervor. The best prize I ever landed from that hallowed venue was a set of pewter D&D minis... about twenty or so, for the princely sum of $6. That was eighties dollars, mind you, but still a pretty good deal.

Hara arena was interesting, but it wasn't until we got a home PC in the nineties that the computer shows got interesting. And thanks to my job I had more of a budget, so I'd shell out for shareware diskettes, little 3.5 disks full of sample games. I still remember tweaking the computer to hell and back so it could handle Wolfenstein 3D without choking. Good times...

But nothing lasts.

The Salem Mall was the first to go, just too big for its own good. It never recovered from the unemployment spike of the eighties and nineties, and when the anchors folded, that was all she wrote. Didn't help that it was in a high crime area, and the gangs made it their own. In a way, its fall would preface the general decline of shopping malls across the nation. It's still there today, closed and ruined. A few years back my airsoft LARP had a chance to play there once, but the mall owners would only accept if we agreed to be locked in there overnight, so nobody else got in. I'd seen too many horror movies to accept that sort of bargain.

The North Dixie flea market didn't leave so much as fade away, losing attendance and vendors as time went on. You need a fairly prosperous lower and middle class to have a good flea market, and Dayton was bleeding jobs too badly to make it worthwhile. I hear that it's converted to mostly antiques... not the same, if it went that route. I'll stop by sometime when the construction isn't ripping the road to shreds and check it out. But I'm not holding my breath, there.

Hara Arena was the last to go. An old, sprawling 70s-era compound, it seemed to resist the march of time through sheer stubbornness. Tons of shows used it as a venue, a local hockey team made it their home, and all sorts of events went on in its concrete-floored halls. But it always seemed to get more rundown as time went on. For all the money it was making, it never seemed to get much more beyond the most basic maintenance. And this year I found out why; its owner had passed away in '98 or so, and his heirs had been fighting over it ever since. The money that would have renovated and saved it went to lawyers instead. It closed this summer. I was there to give her one last send-off.

Nothing stays the same.

Dayton is recovering from its rust-belt days, and the loss of several major corporations. The economic upturn's been good for it, but the city's having to scale down from last-century's grandeur. It'll never be Cincinnati or Cleveland, but it doesn't have to be. The days of my childhood will not come again, and that's okay, because new things come in to replace what's lost.

I'll always remember those trips with Dad, sorting through junk and looking for treasure. And when my daughter's old enough, I'll find places to take her where we can do just that.

Nothing lasts, but it doesn't have to. The cycle continues, and new eyes find joy in new things.