[Editor’s Note: This post is written by Jim Jewell, one of a handful of new writers recently brought on to the RIVET blog. Welcome Jim to RIVET, and enjoy!]

Ken Griffey Jr. returns to Seattle tonight.

If you don’t understand the significance of that statement, then this post is directed to you.

Because you couldn’t possibly have been here in 1995, when streets were utterly barren, when everyone cared about one thing. Junior on first, Edgar hits a double, Griffey rounds third, and an entire city erupts.

Yes, it’s valuable to let the past go, but we can never forget its presence, its purpose. The past is made to crumble and be built upon. Seattle is a city that understands that in her essence, living on her own ashes.

We as artists making art in and inevitably of this city constantly grapple with questions of what the city is, should be, and struggle with the was, whichever was came before us. We wonder whether art can survive in Seattle, forgetting or ignorant of the fact that when Griffey left, Seattle was tripping over its paper money - the Rep was regularly staging shows in its second theater so lavishly designed they’d lose money if they sold out the run. Then techs crashed, and money dried up, and the death of mid-sized theaters was a grim prelude to the Right’s attempted assassination of the middle class.

And yet here we are again, with local theaters attracting world-class talent and earning national recognition, and a crop of young theater artists openly disenchanted with the lack of space for them, which can only precede their carving out of their own space.

If they know it can happen, if they look back long enough to see the cycles, if they read the stories when they roll back through. The point of unindulgent nostalgia isn’t a desire to return to the past, but adopting a spirit that allows the past to return to us, because a place, and therefore our place in it, can only be known on the long view.

I’ll be at Safeco tonight. The last time I saw Griffey in Seattle he was a four-story mural on First. That wall is something different now.