Moving ahead, looking back

This originally appeared in the book "Long Island: Our Story," on Nov. 15, 1998.

When I was a child in Queens, my family used to go on Sunday drives through our own borough and Brooklyn. As our Packard or Studebaker - there was even a Buick with a rumble seat - purred along the city streets, my father would glance at a store or a factory or an apartment building and turn to my mother. "Look, Anna," he would say, "remember, it was just a lot. We could have bought it for a song."

I used to wonder. I couldn't believe there were ever that many empty lots. In Queens perhaps, but not in Brooklyn. Now I understand. I drive through my adopted Long Island along an expressway bordered by ugly sound barriers and on highways ever more spangled with gas stations and fast-food chains and strip malls and I echo my father's refrain.

The changes are subtle yet telling, and they have come like quicksilver. It is like aging - a wrinkle here, a gray hair there and suddenly you are older. A Price Club here and a Home Depot there and the frontier vanishes. Perhaps it has something to do with celebrating my 69th birthday. On the cusp of 70, the world accelerates - childhood lingers gracefully in the halls of memory but the recent past flashes by.

So it is with the last quarter-century. Corporate monoliths have squeezed out sod farms on Pinelawn Road in Melville. Houses stand where dairy cows once grazed along a stretch of Jericho Turnpike in Huntington. Golf courses are replacing potato fields in Riverhead, strip malls spot the road to the East End, Saturday morning at the town dump is a rite of the past, and a lonely drive-in movie in Westbury is the last of its kind.

I bought a house in East Northport in 1959 on what seemed to be the edge of the world and was for the moment the far frontier of suburbia. All of us - my neighbors and I - were settlers. We hacked up our half-acres with three-pronged rakes - we couldn't afford to rent rototillers - and the neighborhood show-off was a rich guy who drove his ride-on mower to the gas station. We were all young and the laughter of kids filled the backyards. Many of the men worked in New York City. In the evening, they got off the train in the haze of steam engines and the wives in the waiting cars slid over to the passenger seats so the men could drive home.

The frontier had moved east to Setauket by the 1970s and the boom was over. The kids were going to college and almost half the houses in the neighborhood had second owners. But I could still keep up with the changes. It was the next quarter-century - the last 25 years - that would leave me breathless like a body surfer in time, trying to stay on top of the waves. And all around me on the shore, the change is ever more visible.

The settlers are in their 60s and 70s now and retirement is a lifestyle that in the last few decades has bred condo communities and senior housing across the Island. Schools my children attended no longer exist. Equally telling, only one or two kids come to my house on Halloween in the neighborhood where I now live. The Long Island they know is graced with parks and beaches but it is much less sylvan than the one my own children grew up in. And I wonder - where have all the sod farms gone?

There are, of course, statistics to quantify the changes that have come so quickly during the past 25 years. But if such statistics are inviolate in themselves, they too often mean what we interpret them to mean. I can only point to my own statistics, my own profile. The landscape of my life mirrors many of the changes Long Island has lived through in these post-pioneer days. Some of the elements, like computers and cell phones and fax machines and television remotes, are universal. Some, like mauve rhododendrons and Montauk daisies, are essentially Long Island. Some others are just me. But let me hold up the mirror and reflect change.

I have been divorced and I have lived with someone and I have remarried. I have two daughters, one of whom is gay and one who is divorced but planning another marriage. Only my son still lives on Long Island but I do not think he will stay here forever. My wife, who is a year younger than my oldest daughter, is a breast cancer survivor. There are many statistics about breast cancer and how it may relate to Long Island. All I know is that a woman who has transformed my life lives with a shadow that will never go away.

Twenty-five years ago, I wore a shirt and jacket and usually a tie when I went out to eat on Saturday night. Today, I'm likely to wear jeans and a sweater and I don't wait for the weekend. I see movies in multiplexes instead of neighborhood theaters. I go to a gym and work out with a trainer.

These days I live in a house that cost three times what I sold the split level for in the early 1980s — the closing costs alone were more than the price I paid for my first home. I pay somebody what I once made in a week to mow my lawn. My wife and I both work and we have a cleaning person who comes every Monday. We live on a pond and we don't sail but we do have a rowboat and an electric motor with a battery I can't lift. I drive a sports utility vehicle and I find a small adventure in standing on the running board and waving my cowboy hat.

Such things are part of a dichotomy that governs our days. As the suburbs become more urban, as farms and fields vanish and mega-stores replace main streets, we search for adventures. We seek romance and that is part of what drew us to Levittown and beyond and why we are drawn to the water's edge and keep moving east.

I drive around my adopted Long Island and marvel at the changes of a quarter century. I echo my father's refrain. It's important to go forward. And it's important to remember the past.

Harvey Aronson, a former Newsday columnist, is the editor of the daily series "Long Island: Our Story."