When I was very young, there was a hardware store just a few blocks away from my house. My parents would take me there to buy Ping-Pong balls, which were a source of endless amusement at the age of four. I would throw them around the living room, bounce them off the windows and struggle to recover them from behind the couch or under the TV. Gradually, my supply of little plastic projectiles would disappear as I dropped the balls down the heating vents — delivering them into “storage,” I believed without irony, long before I ever read 1984.

One day, my parents regretfully told me that the hardware store had burned down. Next door, a restaurant’s deep fryer had gone awry, and the ensuing blaze obliterated both the greasy spoon and the Ping-Pong repository. I remember going to see what remained of the site. A bulldozer sat beside the blackened and partially collapsed frame of the hardware store, and my father pointed to the open lot where the offending eatery used to stand.

As time went by, the disappointment of losing a ready supply of Ping-Pong balls faded. I found new objects, like coins and Hot Wheels cars, to drop through the vents into safekeeping. The burned-out stretch of the thoroughfare near my house was rebuilt, as a branch of Milwaukee’s local bookstore chain Schwartz moved in. Soon after, the time came for formal education, and my parents marched me off to elementary school to begin kindergarten.

My hometown of Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, sits peacefully along the Lake Michigan shoreline. In the 19th century, the village was founded as a lakeside amusement park, separated from downtown Milwaukee by a few miles of forest and farmland. Pleasure-seekers would ride ferryboats from the city to a pier below the fifty-foot bluffs for days of swimming, eating and carnival rides. Today, Whitefish Bay is a residential community, devoid of industry and without commercial activity greater than the local shops. Middle to upper-class families like mine live along quiet streets in multistory houses, a few blocks of apartments or the mansions along the lake shore.

The community has long been well-kept and well-to-do. It is anchored by the public school system, which draws in young families and unites them in the collective exercise of cultivating the next generation. My parents chose the town in part to give my brothers and me a first-rate education. High taxes, ample parental involvement and a goal of excellence make the local schools among the most highly-rated in a state proud of its educational ideals.

Of course, many kids going through the schools could not have cared less about a culture of excellence. Relatively rich and frequently bored, some would spend many hours crawling the run-down mall on the edge of town. Though most people lived within a fifteen-minute walk of the high school, the surrounding blocks were always packed with nice cars on school days. Most of us took multiple AP classes and applied to numerous colleges, simply because we were expected to do so. The more adventurous would drink, smoke and occasionally get into fist-fights in the JCC parking lot with those douchebags from the next high school over. Such antics tended to be quickly dispelled, however, as the overbuilt police usually had little to do beyond directing parade traffic and investigating bicycle theft.

Idyllically suburban and somewhat suffocating, the family-oriented community provides a mundane stasis to residents. Kids like me grow up playing in sprinklers and throwing baseballs; high school football games provide first-date opportunities and bring out the village’s multi-generational families in their varsity letter jackets. The trappings of wealth are quietly manifest, too — professional parents work in downtown high-rises, build backyard swimming pools and fly far away with their kids for vacation. Yet the town sits only a few miles away from some of the toughest neighborhoods in Milwaukee, where shootings are common and voucher programs were invented to address failing schools. The loss of high-paying industrial jobs has contributed to the decline of those areas over the past few decades.

Though our well-groomed corner of town escaped similar difficulty, it is not immune to change: People’s political leanings have evolved, foreign language has come to the elementary schools and new families, as always, move in. Recently, following the death of its founder, Schwartz Bookstores closed down after decades of business. Talk had circulated about new owners running the store independently, but the chance for a brick-and-mortar establishment to flourish seems small in the age of Amazon. The bookstore has been completely stripped, leaving the dusty windows dark; as a matter of convenience, the local literati have been required to take their book signings elsewhere, and to read 1984 on their Kindles.

The site of the hardware store sits empty once again. Its life in my neighborhood reflects my life there — the coming and going of the bookstore dovetails the beginning and end of a chapter of my own. As gradual tinkering consigns more things to memory, the interesting question is, as always, what comes next. Somewhere in my hometown a couple is preparing to send their child to kindergarten, having taken the place of a couple whose children have all moved out. The newcomers might be pondering things as large as education policy or as small as a Ping-Pong ball. Their child will grow up, and bequeathed a legacy he cannot fully appreciate, someday he too will step out to find the world.