Reilly style piece

When we’d left the house that morning my father had told me that we were going to take a tour of the area he grew up in, as the day wore on I realized that this wasn’t a tour of an area, it was a tour of a time. As were walking across country roads and past shops whose names I couldn’t pronounce, every so often we’d stop. We would stop at grocery stores, or gas stations, or vacant lots and he would point and tell me about what used to be there. "We used to ice skate there in the wintertime," he’d say, or "that abandoned garage there is where your great-grandfather used to work."
I was looking at abandoned warehouses and crumbled houses while my father was looking at his past. Ever inch of that town had a story and very few of them were pleasant. We saw the house his grandmother had lived in, which was still in good repair; mostly because my uncle still lives there. It was only a block from my grandparent’s house and took about two minutes to walk to. Next my father took me to the town center. Front and center was an empty warehouse that once housed the most successful business in town. It had closed down after it went bankrupt. Then we walked down by the lake where my father remembered so much about his own childhood. He told me about his daily ride to the train station along that path, and he told me about the hours that he had spent swimming in the lake. As we walked around the lake he talked about walking here at night after arguing with my grandfather and how the darkness made him think more clearly. After we left the path we walked through the new part of town, the part that was built on a burial ground of memories. At every turn there was a house built on the field he played tag at and just past every row of houses was the forest he used to explore. I saw the house he grew up in and I saw the house his friends had lived in.
While we walked I started to get a sense of how he had come to be where he is today, that is to say thousands of miles away from any semblance of his own youth. He had escaped from the falling community he had grown up in and left for his own life far far away. And his detachment had shielded him from being trapped in his own back yard. He was one of the lucky few that ever make it out of small town life and he was much the richer for it.