Once upon a time, there was a neighborhood theater. It showed movies, in black and white until Technicolor came along. From all reports, it was a good place. Eventually, someone invented suburbia, and megaplexes, and times began to change for the good place.

It's utterly natural that this should happen - time is change, after all. Not everything is always the best it will ever be, as the movies shown in that very place would tell you; the fact that things get better proves that theorem in one step. At that particular place and time, however, things were going to get worse, as the money and the politics were shifting away from there.

I hear that, for some time in the bad times, it was the sort of movie theater where the floors get sticky for all the wrong reasons - that's natural as well, a phase we pass through. After that, more time passed, and the place became an opportunity, all the greatness of it gone latent. It still had those great bones, strong and dramatic to the core, and the face of it had learned some new expressions, I'd imagine, in its naughtier incarnation. Still, too many crewcuts and bellbottoms had passed through for that place to be the style, and so it appears to have gone dormant for a time, even as the other neighborhood theaters struggled through.

Eventually of course, they all gave up the ghost, or at least that ghost that flickers to make shows upon the wall. I did see a movie at the last one nearby holding on, a quarter century ago or thereabouts. I can make that much of a claim to know something about the history of which I speak.

In my first year off to college, the rest of my family had moved away from everything I'd ever known, and landed some few city blocks from that one that was still holding on. My mother insisted we all go to a movie, on what might have been my first visit to what is now my end of town. (I think she was trying to show me advantages to measuring distance in city blocks.) The movie we saw was the single one that was playing: a tearjerker which won awards, but captured none of my interest. From my first look, I had no desire to spend precious hours there - the place itself struck me as shabby, and about to go down.

Still, amid wishing I had been somewhere else, I was drawn to that place and that time by a moment. My mother, of course, was following the movie, and was for that one moment overwhelmed. She had been quietly having a tough time with her days, in trying to be a city girl, and the movie had in some way touched that nerve. She turned to my shoulder and cried on it, which she'd never done before, despite having a perfectly good husband seated on the other side of her. (Which has happened however many times since, but my mom was the first.) I was stoic and simply permitted it, having no other life script to apply, but I'll never quite forget being teenaged and not understanding why my mommy was crying on me in the dark. We never spoke of it afterward, and I'm sure she wouldn't remember it now if I did.

That place, that theater I knew, went ghostless shortly afterward, and I never saw another movie there. The place was soon reincarnated, as a hardware store of all things. Someone went to some large amount of trouble to have earthmovers level out the formerly theater-sloped floor, but the walls still bear the old theater lights, and you can see projector windows high on the west wall. I throw away money buying things for my house there, now that I, strangely, live fewer blocks away than my family did when my mother cried. I need that place to stay open, so I fund it - I'm not sure I could bear to see what would come to that space next, if I let that store fold.

So this was how I knew of neighborhood theaters, when I met the one that had lain dormant. That one, the one that I spoke of when this thing began, isn't so much farther away from me than the one I just spoke of, the one I cannot let fold. Amazing I'd never really noticed that other, though there was nothing interesting there a decade ago, back when I was driving past it each day. But time had passed, and time is change, and it seems that place, and its good bones and new expressions, had been met with the energy of young people who could make something of them again, at the time that I met with that place.

I met that place during that odd brief period when you could charge people to leave their homes and do what you're doing right now - charge them by the hour to read the Internet. There was a brief time, you may recall, when that was both worth doing and costly to do in your home, so it was a practical service one could offer. It was done from one of the storefronts also under the roof of that old theater, and though I ambled in there once or twice, I really was more about the storefront farther down the way under that roof. (Farther, that is, if you're kind enough to be going the right way down the one-way street they both open on.)

They sold coffee there; still do. For details, consult most of the rest of this thing - this is still the ongoing love letter to the place, the souls, the circumstances that gave unto me this name. The less said here of that the better, for I'm unable to do it justice, and this thing tends mercilessly long. Let's focus instead on the building, and the bones of it, and its ghosts.

Any who've spent enough time there allude to the ghosts when they speak. There are small things, small impressions, that add up to nothing but that. Perhaps it's the ghost that flickered at first, when the films were the new things in town. Perhaps the remains of the moans none would claim are mixed in with the spirits that hold the place down; as the building has stood for quite a long while, it might be inferred that there's something interred that makes the place breathe as it does, on its own.

Or, you know, whatever - in any case, there are forces there that can only be discussed in the manner poetic. Those who can, who spend time there, often do - those who can't, they simply mention them, and slowly shake their heads.

This was what came into the hands of the young people - the owners, the lessors, and those they'd attract. The owners in particular played up to those ghosts, though I won't be the one to testify that they'd meant to. A local artist decorated the bricks facing the parking lot with a mural, two stories tall, celebrating the coffee they had brought to the place and the music they wanted to hear play there. They remodeled the place so that music might play, tearing the roof down to bare rafters, showing those good bones of the place. They brought in a stage where The King had once walked, on the last date souls paid him to hear what they loved. I only know the stories, of these and the other things that were done, by hearsay - but the mojo was heavy, whatever they did. They found themselves starting to be a success.

I walked 'round the block a few times for their shows, or for those who would work at the door, I suppose. They had just a few people, then dozens, then hundreds, as people came to understand that they were there, and that they rocked. Radio station vans would park on that little street, teenagers would stand in line around the block, and the very walls would sweat once the first notes would sound. The times had become good again, and at times the ghosts would roar.

The process of its growing was a subtle sort of thing - I don't mean to imply the change happened in an instant. Time is change, and change takes time, and I arrived somewhere in the middle. I felt privileged to see it all unfolding, that spirit being released. Those who I saw there often seemed, to varying degrees, to be aware that some magic was being tapped, and lent themselves to it in ways that they best could. I myself contributed some stoic and some shoulder, some sweat and even words within the wall. With kisses three, so as not to break the spell...

All poetry aside, the consensus was that it was becoming... that it had become, by then, a special place, a destination. Stories with foolish majesty would flicker around the place, some tinged with the naughtiness that once had soaked into the place. (I still smirk sometimes when I look at the coffeeshop countertop, when I rest on that damned old love seat.) People in the neighborhood were caught up in them, in those stories that played at the theater, for this is what neighborhood theaters do. Left to itself, I think the place would still be doing that - I think that it's utterly natural that it would. The spirit of the place seemed amenable and more, and so, then, did many of its people.

Money, however, notices the energy of these things, once the poetry is left aside. The owners, in their apartments improbably located within the place, soon were discussing the offers that were starting to be made. They considered cashing it out, with people who understood and could make the price right. After all, one can't live forever under a spell. They took steps, tried to commit, which seems to me utterly natural.

Politics notices the energy of money, and hearsay tells me this is where it all went awry. I'll never really know the story, but I know that it ends with apartments vacant, title transferred, and no risk whatsoever that hundreds would ever again park near there, to flock to that theater and stir its ghosts into the wee hours of the night. Just like that, a change had come, a time had passed, with no poetry to the ending of any kind.

Ghosts notice these changes in energy, even for some time beforehand. What is time and change, after all, to a ghost... Had I found the right sensitivity at the right time, I might have seen it coming along, from the more erratic movements of the spirits of the place. The jarring notes, the things untrue, the ugly stains the building left with the sweat... I could have known.

I was reflecting on this the other day, walking toward that mural, and remembering. It was an anniversary of sorts - more so than most days, at least - so I sat in the place that I had sat then. Improbably perched on an improbable guardrail, just around the corner from the line of the mural's view, I sat and I remembered a lady, who had turned to my shoulder and cried on it there. I wish I could remember the words we actually said, but all I can summon is the spirit of it...

"It's all ending, Frank," she said through the tears. (Her sensitivity was such that she was seeing what the next Bad Day would bring, before it did.) "I don't know if I can leave it - it's been so good to me - will there ever be a place like this again?"

I sat quiet for a second, but the script of the story had me giving a true answer. It could not be avoided, though it was left to me to improvise the lines, however the spirit would move me. At that point, after all the things I'd seen finish, I should understand my role. I found the right voice for the moment, and replied.

"No, no there won't. There will be places for you that will be good, that will be right, that honestly will be better - but it won't quite be like this place, this time. You will get echoes of this, I believe, forever, and I think that this place will be what you'll always compare every good place to. I think that you'll have plenty of those, I really do."

Whatever ghost we communed with, there roaring in the back of the place, seemed satisfied with this - the question, and the answer - and our sensitivities no longer drew us to the moment. The tears dried almost instantly, and the conversation came apart in the way a stage set does when it's struck. We walked together down the improbable little path that leads down under the mural, and went together back to the roles that we loved one last time in that place. One more time, she'd make coffee, and I'd drink it, as if it were that simple.

It was only later, only after much more story unfolded, that I wondered if it was her or the ghost that was crying. Certainly I never saw her cry again, even when that Bad Day came two days later, two years ago.

Perhaps all that was just spirits trying to remind me how neighborhood theaters work. The place does try to give me clues... I could have known.

As I retraced my steps down that path the other day, I noticed that now its mural was tagged. (Despite the strutting "security walks" its new owner makes around the place, though only at the moment of the day least likely to have anything interesting happening.) Hot pink was the jarring color of the spray paint that was used, and the letters the mural now wore, with its coffee and its music, read "LSD".

When I saw that, I saw the whole place as if seeing it for the first time. The place itself struck me as shabby, and about to go down.

I closed my eyes as I passed that mark, so as not to have to keep looking, and I saw when I closed them that darkness again, the kind with the tears that I don't understand.