I had the oddest experience this week. It was like memories washing over me but the context was all screwy and it was messing with my head. I was taking a tour of the amazingly vast Architectural Salvage complex with the owner, Bob Johnson. The facility, which houses tens of thousands of square feet of recovered historical artifacts, building materials and antiques, was also once the home of the Eagle Window and Door Company.

Now I might be some kind of media mogul wannabe these days, but once upon I time I had a lovely mullet and was trying to pay for college and beer. To accomplish this feat, I worked summers and holidays at, you guessed it, Eagle Windows. And not the fancy new Eagle Windows, the good old-fashioned one on 9th Street. Five stories of well-worn concrete and timber. For those of you who know the company, I worked in set-up. That’s where we used finished windows to create custom multiunit window monstrosities like angle bays five windows wide and three windows high. Three summers and two Christmases. It was the longest, hardest hours I’d worked since the days of stacking hay in Grandpa’s barn. Most people didn’t like set-up because it was heavy work. But with the need for creating custom-trim mitered joints and all that stuff, the creative aspects of the department made it a far better option than putting the same parts on 1,000 of the same windows.

I worked with the best people imaginable, and a few curmudgeonly old bastards. Mike Paradiso would lead the department in sing-alongs. Boots would regale us with stories, like being run over twice in the same night by the same car. And then there were the practical jokes. I enjoyed using the table saw to cut the ends of of Boots’ cigarettes so they all fell out when he picked up his pack on the way to break. They there was sending the new guy to fetch items that didn’t exist, like a box of window cranks for a double-hung (they don’t have cranks) or a left-handed wiggle nailer. It was funny at the time. Maybe you had to be there.

Anyway, so Bob’s walking me through a number of areas of the architectural warehouse. And it took me a while before I realized where I was. It’s amazing how the mere application of a warehouse can completely change its character. Without realizing it, I was standing right in the middle of my old department. A place I had spent literally thousands of hours building and boxing up the Cadillacs of windows.

The walls and floors held scars of decades of work and hundreds of workmen who passed through the doors. There were occasional scribbles and words carved into the wood here and there and I realized, I had never left my mark anywhere in the place. What was I thinking? Doing it now wouldn’t be the same. I did, however, leave the boys with a song.

If you’ve been reading the Inkubator for long, you know I have a band and even then, at the ripe old age of 20, I was penning the next big hit. In this case, it was “The Set-Up” song, a silly 12-bar blues tune that combined every stupid euphemism and memory that we created in three years of working together. Just this weekend I saw Boots for the first time in ages and he mentioned the song. It may now be legend. I was left thinking about how much my life had changed in the last decade since my days at the factory.

I don’t feel much different, but I’ve seen a lot since then, much like the building itself. At its core, it was very much the same, but it too was living a whole new life, filling new roles and fitting into the community in a wholly different way. Bob and his partners have big plans for the warehouse complex and it was exciting to hear about its renaissance, while at the same time very weird to imagine as I looked from the roof down into the prison-like break area you might loosely have called a courtyard. It’s a place where my memories are fond but dominated by thoughts of long hours of work.

Now, it will be a place of comfort, even home, to many people, who will have a completely different story to tell ten years later. What’s the moral to my story? If you have the chance, leave some graffiti somewhere in your office or workplace. You never know when you might stumble across it in another life. And to all my friends at Eagle Windows and those who have gone on to become something else: Thanks for some of the best memories of my life. And friends, if you need an angle-bay window, I can make you one.