As many of you know, I call Merrimack “home” these days. It’s a great little town, even though I think the local police spend too much time writing traffic tickets (or so it seems).

We like it here. We really do. But I guess my roots will always be a few miles south of here in Nashua.

There’s something special about the place you were raised in, grew up in, went to school in. That’s true even if you one day put your hometown in your rear-view mirror in pursuit of those proverbial greener pastures.

That’s like me and Texas. If I had my druthers, I’d “ruther” be in Texas. That’s never going to happen in whatever is left of my lifetime, but even if it did, I’d still be a Nashuan by birth and blood.

There’s a certain familiarity about that place you came from that is comforting, especially as you get a tad older. That’s partly why I pulled up stakes two years ago, leaving the Texas I love for the state I call home.

That’s why one schoolyard friend of mine named Gerry Kirkpatrick came back earlier this year, and another – Steve Kopka – is thinking about leaving the Land of Enchantment for the Granite State.

No matter where I go in
Nashua, I can connect almost every street or field or alley with something I did or experienced as a kid. Granted, much has changed in Nashua – and not always for the better – but it still remains pretty much as I remember it.

The other night, my wife and I drove to Nashua for a couple of cheese slices from Espresso Pizza. The funky, decades-old booths were replaced this past year or so with tall, new tables. And Espresso’s now sells beer.

But what hasn’t changed is the pizza, which tastes as yummy as I remember it from when I wolfed down my first slices there, walking from Nashua High School, when it was on Elm Street, to where we lived on Broad Street in the mid-1960s.

Does anyone remember one of the city’s first sub shops called “Atomic Subs” on Allds Street? I mean, the corner mom-and-pop grocery stores, like Roger Guerette’s on Arlington and Gillis streets, made and sold fresh “grinders,” but full-blown sub shops like Atomic were a new-to-Nashua thing back then. Danelly’s Subs & Pizza, as we know it today, has been around in one form or another there since 1965.

Old-timers like me also might recall that Danelly’s is located in what used to be Larry’s Bike Shop, before Larry moved his shop to Bridge Street.

I remember one Saturday afternoon in May, when my mom and dad told me they had a big birthday surprise for me.

We walked over to Larry’s from our Harvard Street apartment, and I walked out with a shiny, new, made-in-America Schwinn bicycle. My dad couldn’t afford a car back then, and walked a mile or more to work every day, but he made sure I had a new bike.

Nashua has many reminders of its shoe-making past. One of them is that long brick factory on Lake Street.

My Aunt Yvonne worked for many years at Sportwelt Shoe, which was right across the street from her house at 56 Lake St. She managed to talk the “big boss,” whom she called “Moustache,” into hiring me for the summer when I was 16. It was my first job.

In those days, shoe soles were made from plain, undyed leather. To make them black, someone dipped the soles to soak them in a large tub filled with oil. I was that guy, which I guess makes me something of a real “sole man,” huh?

I oiled soles at Sportwelt for the then-minimum wage of
$1.25 an hour, which earned me $50 a week ($40 after taxes). I was rich! I saved my pennies
that summer and bought a new Silvertone acoustic guitar from Sears, when it was still on Main Street.

The next summer, I moved up to bagging groceries at the former Grand Union-Champagne’s, which was next to Beebe Rubber on East Hollis Street. Both are gone now. The good news for my mom was at least I didn’t come home looking like I had been dipped in oil.

But my fondest childhood memories of the Gate City are of Christmas. The annual Winter Holiday Stroll captures some of that magic and spirit. Before there were malls, you only had one place to shop – downtown.

But seeing the trees lit up on Library Hill, the downtown stores open and the lights along Main Street are what do it for me. Part of me still would like to be in Texas, but my heart is here in Nashua.

I’d like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous and happy New Year.

Paul Sylvain lives and writes from his home in Merrimack. His column appears on the second Sunday of the month. He can be reached at psylvain.telegraph@yahoo.com.