Painting Memory Bricks
Some of the old bricks
I have painted scenery on
depict life in
a simpler time.
Some of the buildings
I've painted are
long gone.
The memories remain
at the museum and in
the minds of old timers
who remember the former
school and a train that
used to come through town.
Life was hard, but
more laid back.
I bring the scenes to life
on the sides of the
historic bricks, still on sale
at the museum.
The bricks are all that remain.
The echoes of children playing
within those buildings can still
be heard when we go
down memory lane.
-- Brigitte Werner
William Bowen may have coined the phrase "memory lane" in his story, "That Frozen Pipe," which appeared in "Detroit Free Press" in 1881 or earlier and was reprinted in his "Chained Lightning, a Book of Fun" in 1883: "When you have come as near as may be to the frozen spot, hold the flat-iron on the pipe and settle down for ten minutes of meditation. You won't have traveled down memory's lane over half a mile before something will happen. The pipe will burst exactly on a line with your eyes, and you will have cause to wonder all the rest of your life how a gallon of water could have collected at that one point for your benefit." In 1894 B. M. Balch used it as the title of a story in the "Hamilton Literary Magazine' and gave the phrase a visible identity: "On the shore of vast gray sea lies an old town; so old that no records of its founding have ever been discovered, though its archives cover centuries of existence. Every wall is crumbling away. Every gable is lichen-grown and covered with moss. In the whole great city there is nothing new. Thro the centre of the town a quaint old street, paved with square blocks of various hues from a somber gray to a bright crimson, runs down to the sea. This is Memory Lane—lonely and drear to some, pleasant and gay to others." By 1903 a song called "Memory Lane" by R. H. Elkin and A. L. Liebmann appeared in London (the oldest citation in the "Oxford English Dictionary"). It seems to have infiltrated American English in 1924 in the title of a popular song by Buddy G. de Sylva, Larry Spier, and Con Conrad, performed by Irving Kaufman; the song was revived in the 1944 Bud Abbott & Lou Costello film "In Society."
ReplyDeleteStars are gleaming, day is o'er.
Moonlight beaming on the shore.
Still I'm lonely, thinking only
Of those lovely days of yore.
I am with you wandering through memory lane
Living the years, laughter and tears, over again.
I am dreaming yet of the night we met
When life was a lovely refrain.
You were so shy saying goodbye there in the dawn.
Only a glance full of romance, then you were gone.
Though my dreams are in vain my love will remain
Strolling again memory lane with you.