"She's got a smile that it seems to me/ Reminds me of childhood memories/ Where everything was as fresh as the bright blue sky/... Where do we go now?" -- "Sweet Child O' Mine" by Guns N' Roses

For the last couple of hours, I've been listening to the past. Music from my high school days. Poison, Salty Dog, Guns N' Roses. There is more, tons more, but that's what I pulled out of the stacks this morning. As I work on resumes, writing clips and other examples of the last ten years of my life, this is the soundtrack. This is all I have? I wonder, trying to locate those great, incisive pop culture criticism pieces of the past. There is more, but so much of it is lost. Not only from the cobwebs of my mind, but from my files and stacks and boxes of files and stacks.

Too many moves, too many bad feelings, too much of everything else. I never was much of a bookkeeper anyway.

But the music keeps me in check. Makes me realize where I was ten years ago, and where I've been since then. And even though what I listened to didn't reflect my reality much, it was on my mind a lot of the time. All those black concert t-shirts, all those cut-up jeans.

A few weeks ago, I was in Clovis, New Mexico again. Where most of my teenage memories reside, and where I finally fled from in the early 90s. It took a while to totally tear myself away, there was a comfort in knowing that home was a definite place, and Clovis (or C-Ville as I call it) was home--for a while.

I was in town to clean up past mistakes. Not personal mistakes, mind you. Merely physical ones. My parents owned a bookstore in Clovis during the 80s and early 90s, and they still owned the building. After sitting empty for a year or two, it was finally decided that cleaning up the mess of the previous tenants and making it look good enough to buy was in order. Since my parents live in Kansas City now, it was up to my brother and a friend (whose parents still reside in C-Ville) to get the work done. Although my mom did come down to supervise.

The work was painting, cleaning and bit of construction work. But nothing out of the ordinary. My entire childhood was spent working on whatever house my parents bought. We never bought a house finished enough to live in, and we never finished the projects we started. A family legacy if there ever was one.

But at night, after the work was done, my brother, friend and I went around the town, looking for the past. C-Ville is barely over 30,000 people residing on flat former ranch land surrounded by more ranch land so close to the Texas border you can hear the twang. The place hasn't changed much over the last ten years.

Sure, there are more chain stores and restaurants, but that's not really something to brag about. A super Wal-Mart (one of those mega-stores with grocery attached) sits at the northern end of town. If you come in from the southwest, you can see the migration has begun. Boarded up buildings and For Sale signs dot the area near the highway. But as you travel to the north side of town (it doesn't take long, say five minutes), you see where everyone has gone. I wonder if in ten years there will be a ghost Clovis to the south while the people live in the new sparkly northern C-Ville.

Ironic that as "Paradise City" plays, I can pull up both good and bad memories of this place. Most of the good stuff concerns the regular shenanigans teens do to amuse themselves. Sneaking out in the middle of the night, drinking at Ned Houk Park, dragging Main. The bad, well, it was dealing with living in a small town and trying to be a teenager. Dealing with parents and teachers and, sometimes, the cops.

A familiar story for most of us. We all have that small area of the world where we lived for a while. And then left. Because you have to leave. You have to get away from the past. Or the present is just a repeat, a desperate attempt to recreate everything that was great and now is just routine.

I'm going back to Clovis tomorrow to finish the job on the store building. I may not return there for a few years or ever--although ever seems like too long to hide. I always have to show my face to the past, just to keep it all in perspective. There will be work, there will be play, and there might even be a once-around down Main. Kids still go up and down the brick drag, bouncing their lowriders, blasting their music, and trying desperately to look cool.

I look in their faces now and see myself. And all those friends and girlfriends and enemies. Of course, none of them recognize me. Which is, somehow, the point of it all.

Matt Worley recommends trying the combo burrito at Taco Box, but not much else in the city of Clovis.