Oh...How Things Have Changed

 I've only been away from working daily in downtown Salt Lake City six years.

A lot can happen in six years.

Just look around.

I had a meeting in a building where I worked for fourteen years. When you work in one building for almost a decade and a half, you get to know not only the building, but the surrounding buildings, streets, even people. It's hard not to. We would take walks around the neighborhood on breaks, I would see the progress made as I took public transportation to and from work almost every work day.

Man, have things changed. 

I knew of many of the changes. There's a building where previously the was a small patch of grass next to the new Harmons Grocery Store. There's a new building going up where the Hardees/Carls Jr restaurant once stood. I didn't know there's an entire block of small bohemian second-hand stores that are gone...completely gone, being replaced by apartment buildings. There were other new things as well.

And perhaps the most iconic change is what's happening to the city's most recognizable structure...the Salt Lake LDS Temple. It's going through major renovations to make it earthquake-proof. If you didn't know it was the temple, you might not recognize it at all. 

As I drove home, traffic patterns remained the same (I guess some things never change...), though the cars/trucks/suvs/motorcycles were newer. I thought about all those differences as I left. The world--is in a constant stage of change, not just downtown. And time and change is relative. A bug may only live a day, or a building may survive centuries. I suppose if you lived forever, change would be on an entirely different level of amazing.

I don't know the next time I'll be downtown. Even if it's only a year, in some places it'll be a completely different place.