STREET Magazine ONLINE

More than a year ago, I answered an ad but ended up answering a Call. There I was, driving down 25th Street with an actual destination. This was supposed to be the street that one used as a detour to get somewhere else. I’d driven on it before but now, with an address and a purpose, I didn’t feel so much the stranger. As tired as my old Buick sounded and ran, it seemed at home among the historic buildings that were nestled against each other on the first two blocks. There on the Street, I breathed in the whiffs of something new and maybe enduring.

It has been all but mundane since my first two columns were released into the wild. They were both timid and fanged with perhaps no niche in the scheme of things. This entire magazine has been the result of creative flow from the raw material of ambition. I have seen the desire in not just our staff, but the other denizens of Ogden who know that the world doesn’t revolve around them but that Ogden revolves with it.

For me, legacy is memory, tradition, and an inseparable bond with that one thing in life that moves us. For some it’s the TV remote; others: art, music, or food; and deep down, for all of us, it’s in our family and friends.

I'm not saying there are good and bad legacies, just that some endure longer than others. The question intrigues me just as it has those before : What would people say about me when I am gone? How long will the ripples last from the splash of my life in this great seething Earth-City pond? More often, they go to the shore of another world or dissipate against some counter-tide of time. I feel the ripples and spheres of influence of countless people without even knowing who they are or what they look like. Right now: a child is born three months too early; somebody for the first time discovers the color purple; a man or woman calls the police because their spouse goes ballistic; up at WSU, a girl is taking that haunting exam; and off ‘in another corner,’ somebody is wondering if life is worth it...

We are our own worst enemies and apathy is the heavy artillery. It gives all of us shell-shock to one degree or another. There is an urge in each of us to begin new patterns and enduring resolutions, not just the ones associated with a new year. What about today, tomorrow, and the day after? I hope they get their resolutions, too.

All this time, as we seek for whatever moves us, our traditions, as brief or timeless as they Amay be, will be interwoven with that of Ogden’s. Her influence is in the train tracks, running parallel to our world of traffic and stoplights. Ben Lomond Peak is a good sign of nature’s legacy. It is also in the buildings, the old ones as well as new. It is, of course, in the marks of our ancestors. For us here at the Jive Drive office, we just say… it’s on the Street.

Dason Smith - Winter 2003