About two weeks ago, as I was walking into the Tri-City Voice building, focused on my morning routine, I almost didn’t notice the huge excavator across the street tearing down the old Teen Center at Central Park.
How I nearly passed a 20,000-pound piece of machinery destroying a building, I’m not sure. But it got me thinking about how sometimes we wait and wait for something for so long, that when it happens we don’t even recognize it.
While reading last week’s editorial by Samantha about growing older she said, “The crazy thing about aging is that you don’t know it’s happening until all of a sudden, you’re old.” I thought about how that can happen in many areas of our lives, including our own cities.
Around Fremont and Newark there have been many changes to its landscape. Newark has seen a steady increase in condos all over the city. Down Cedar Boulevard, near Mowry Avenue, construction has been rolling along for years. Three-floor condos have been sprouting from the ground it seems. It only takes a few weeks of using an alternative road to come back and see families already moved into the condos where I was used to seeing empty lots.
For a long time, from the Tri-City Voice second-floor window, we’ve been able to clearly see the fenced-off area of the—now old—teen center as it was being prepped for construction for the upcoming community center.
The fence sat there for months until it became just another part of the landscape. So when the center’s demolition began I almost missed it completely.
Sometimes change feels really slow until you realize that the majority of what controls the change happens under the surface. Unfortunately, that also goes for aging.
