We went to Charlotte on Saturday. My daughter had a dance competition at Central Piedmont Community College, and my 11-year-old son and I had about an hour and a half to kill. We spent it walking on the Little Sugar Creek Greenway from CPCC down to Morehead Street. Over the course of a mile, I discovered something shocking: Trees, when left to grow for a decade, get tall.

I was pointing out to my son (who, to his credit, sort of kinda listened to me) that there was a bench behind the Metropolitan where I did not propose to his mother. It’s a long story, but basically she’d been waiting for me to get down on one knee for a few weeks. At first, I couldn’t do that because I didn’t have the ring yet. Then, weeks later, when I did have the ring, I didn’t have a great place to keep it on my person without it obviously jutting out of a pocket. So I left it at home when we went out to a nice dinner at (the now-closed) Carpe Diem in Elizabeth. Afterward, I did not propose. Then, I suggested we go on a little walk on the greenway. It was a lovely evening, and we sat for a little bit on that bench in front of the Metropolitan where we could take in the orange, pink, and purple hues in the skies over the Charlotte skyline. Again, my soon-to-be-fiancee was waiting in anticipation, all the way up to the moment when I said, “welp, let’s go home and watch Mad Men.”

Finally, when we’d gotten back to my condo, I popped in a DVD (this was a very normal thing to do in 2011, kids). It was not Mad Men. It was a video I’d created over the last few weeks using a Sony Handycam (2011!). A montage of some of our favorite places popped up under a Jack Johnson song. As soon as it started playing, she knew that, at last, finally, I was proposing. Her mind went blank, and before we went out back on the balcony to enjoy a bottle of champagne on ice, I had to re-enact the part where I got on one knee in front of the couch. If this seems less than romantic, then consider the fact that my father proposed to my mother at a stop sign. They just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary a few days ago.

Anyhow, I was relaying this deeply personal story to my son as we came upon the very bench where his mom and I had sat and gazed at the majesty of uptown Charlotte some 15 years before. And you know what? You can’t see the skyline from there. Not at all.

The entire greenway is now shaded and enveloped by 20- to 30-foot-tall trees. It was simultaneously refreshing and alien. My son took in all of the statues, the ornate bridges and tunnels, the sculpture honoring the kids who once lived at an orphanage nearby. I couldn’t get over the trees. I remembered when this greenway was brand new! Any plants were just sticks with leaves! Everything clean and fresh and clear of graffiti and grime and mud! There was a statue of a guy on a horse! Back then, it was just another piece of evidence, along with the light rail, a political convention, and a bona-fide bribery scandal, that Charlotte was a real big city.

Of course, I left all of that behind eleven years ago this month. I’ve talked before about the jarring experience of going back to a city that’s added roughly 150,000 people since I moved away in 2015. At first, I really missed it. How could I not? I went back to visit quite a bit, and early on, it felt really weird being a visitor in a city that I’d called home for a decade. I was able to move on, though, thanks to a new job that allowed me to explore the rest of the state, and a growing family that allowed me to bloom in a smaller town. We started road tripping to Raleigh and Durham more, just because everything there felt brand new and it was slightly closer to us. It took a few years, but I went from the Charlotte expert on the Our State staff to a person who, simply, used to live in Charlotte a while back. My recommendations started to feel dated (although I’d still wholeheartedly tell you to go to The Roasting Company on Montford or Lupie’s on Monroe Road or Thomas Street Tavern). Last year, the fine folks at QC Nerve sent me a “RIP Old Charlotte” t-shirt with the names of iconic dead restaurants and hangouts on it. I was alarmed by how many of them I’d visited.

After the dance competition, the whole family and I went over to Plaza Midwood for lunch. When I first arrived in Charlotte 20 years ago, it was the coolest neighborhood in town. Dish was new. I’d go have breakfast at John’s Country Kitchen from time to time. I’d play ping pong out back at Thomas Street Tavern. I’d stop in for pizza at Fuel, or pop over to Dairy Queen for a Blizzard, or sing some karaoke with friends at Petra’s, or get some work done at Common Market. When my wife and I were looking to move out of our condo, we looked pretty hard at some bungalows nearby. When I was still a new writer at Charlotte magazine, I wrote about what I figured would be the neighborhood’s defining issue: The changing of the guard at The Penguin Drive-In.

I thought about all of that as my family and I took a quick lap around the block. Snug Harbor and the Jamaican restaurant were still there. So was Common Market and The Diamond, which was revived by the manager who’d decamped from The Penguin. But the other side of Pecan Avenue was now home to a very large building full of restaurants and apartments. Zada Jane’s was gone. Amelie’s, which is where my wife and I met, had long since branched out from one location in NoDa, and now had a new storefront on Central Avenue (we came, we saw, we ordered macaroons and salted caramel brownies). My wife and I did a mild bit of complaining. We kept on saying some version of: This certainly isn’t how it used to be. But we also marveled at something else: There were so many people there. Walking on sidewalks. Eating outside. Rolling around on bikes. That certainly hadn’t been the case when we were there, when the pedestrians were mostly limited to folks walking from their cars to the bars. It wasn’t like it used to be. But it somehow felt more alive.

Being grumpy about something changing is almost always the easiest reaction. But I think it’s the wrong one. I used to get mad that my Charlotte was disappearing. Of course, that’s a dumb complaint: I, too, had disappeared from Charlotte, and things got along just fine without me.

It’s really easy to get trapped in what you assume were the good old days, which is a selfish point of view. There’s a whole new generation of people who are coming to this place and had no idea how it used to be, and the more we old timers complain about it, the more bitter and upset we’ll look. Of course it was cooler back in the day! But nothing ever stays the same, and the more we try to keep it that way, either in reality or in our minds, the more we’re fighting the inevitable. In my 20s, I would have loved to live in Plaza Midwood. If I was in my 20s today, I probably would feel the same way, even though they’re completely different places. A new apartment might be the sought-after place like an old bungalow used to be.

I thought about that while I watched my kids experience places that had once meant so much to me. My daughter was really into Amelie’s, despite the fact that it had only been there for a matter of weeks. They thought the big buildings that cast long shadows were cool. We tried to explain what The Penguin stood for, or that Jackalope Jack’s hadn’t always been on this particular corner, but they didn’t seem to care all that much. They just ate their lunch at Milkbread and didn’t care when we explained how this place was once a really old school Dairy Queen. They’ll never know this neighborhood like I did. But I’ll never know this neighborhood like the people who came a generation before me, and I won’t understand it like the people who go there now. My memories are imperfect. My experiences, if you spent time in Charlotte, weren’t the same as yours. All of these places that I remember were once infused with so much meaning, but that meaning never stays the same. The sooner I—and we—recognize that, the more we can give ourselves to the present instead of the past.

Earlier on the greenway, my son was really into the idea that we could, somehow, ride our bikes all the way to South Carolina. I’d been fixated on the fact that I couldn’t see uptown Charlotte from my favorite spots, and was a little blindsided that my son was excited to do something that wasn’t possible when I lived here. Back then, the greenway stopped just short of the Park Road Shopping Center. Now, in its new form, you could go further than I ever thought would be possible. Sometimes, it just takes a pair of fresh eyes to show you something you’d once been too stubborn to see.