Well, if you’ve read more than a couple of the offerings here, you get by now that I am afflicted with a serious case of what San Francisco Chronicle legend Herb Caen referred to as “terminal nostalgia”.

Whether it be San Francisco, Disneyland or a host of other topics, I long for a simpler, less complicated existence, surrounded by those comfortable places and people of days gone by. And secretly, don’t we all?

It’s not that I don’t enjoy the folks and places of today. Heck, those are what make the nostalgia of tomorrow, right? No, it’s something deeper than that. And I’ll leave to the professional to delve into the “why’s” and “where for’s” of making this peculiar idiom tick the way it does.

The movie on DVD above is “Things Change”, from 1988. A nice little movie, filmed on the North Shore of Lake Tahoe, not too far away from where my family had vacation homes, once upon a time. Well worth a viewing, the scene where the title comes into play is one of my favorites.

Here in the Bay Area, big corporate news this week. Longs Drugs, a fixture in the West (including Hawaii) is going to be acquired by pharmacy giant CVS. No big deal. Mergers and acquisitions like this happen every day.

But Longs? It goes way back. 1938, to be precise. Started small and grew to over 490 stores in California, Nevada and the Islands. Headquartered in Walnut Creek, the folks who work in the stores do their part to keep something of the personal service that got the stores going still alive today.

Most of the stores won’t close as CVS doesn’t have much of a presence in these states. Just the name will change at first and we’ll see what comes down the road.

Another Walnut Creek tradition is also heading off into the sunset at the end of the month, Pinky’s Pizza. As pizza places go, it’s pretty much a standard. You’ll find families, teens and groups of all kinds enjoying the place.

Since 1970, it’s been something of an institution, especially with the high school crowd. Las Lomas High School is a few blocks away and during football season, Friday nights after a game found the place pretty busy over the years. It had a much maligned pool table at one time before pinball gave way to video games. And over the years, I have managed to enjoy more than my share of beer and pizza here, including some really tasty crab pizzas. Never could get into the black smoked oyster pizza, however.

Walnut Creek is where I spent most of my teenage years. When we moved there in June of 1970, it was still the small town of America. Main Street really was the main place for activity of all kinds. If your business was going to do well, it had to be there. And Friday night cruising from one end to the other was something that could take all

night to accomplish. With a big classic yellow and green Safeway at the south end and a real Mel’s Drive In at the other, there was a downtown in between.

The City had an annual harvest festival (for what else, walnuts?) held in the City Park, complete with two parades. Into the mid Sixties, it was a two railroad town with stations on both. At one time, it had an IHOP, Lyons and Dennys - and the last two were open 24 hours a day. And they weren’t the only places like that either.

If someone who left in 1970 came back today, they would think that they had come back to the wrong place. It isn’t that is has changed so much. It is that what was once a town is today just a shopping mall; anchored on the south by a major hospital complex and on the north by automobile dealerships. The real small town has been replaced by something you might have expected in a strip mall community of where ever you might imagine one to be.

The community is still there in some fashion. Maybe generations have come and gone. Yet I know that some of the same families still get together like they used to every week. A bit older and hopefully a bit wiser with the passing of the years, hopefully.

Yet I miss the place, you know? From the dairy at the bottom of the hill where you could ride up on your bike and get a frozen ice cream treat, to the donut shop where Starbuck might have been something out of Moby Dick, that someone was reading for high school. It wasn’t see how much we can jam into the space in search of retail greed.

It was that simpler, less complicated time, surrounded by all of those comfortable places and people.

Things change...