Last Saturday night yet another beautiful old building in my town burnt. I was up half the night or more watching smoke and flames out my bedroom window. It took upwards of six hours and 9 fire companies to fight this fire. The most obvious damage is to a building which housed one of the town's two dive bars. Also damaged in the fire was the (for the past few years empty and for sale) theater next door where I spent four happy years doing 40 shows back to back. And we did a lot of drinking in that dive bar in those four years! And the courthouse annex on the other side of the bar sustained some damage but it was light enough that they opened for business Monday morning. The only good news about all this is that everyone got out okay. There were apartments above the bar, and all the residents are being take care of at the moment.

So, on my way out to the store for groceries tonight, I swung downtown and snapped a few pictures of the old girl. It's heartbreaking. Town still smells like charred wood. I don't know what the future holds for these buildings. We've had a lot of these fires, and rarely is there the money to rebuild.

But the thought that keeps going through my head is this:

Memories, at least, can never go up in smoke.