I walked to Seward School first through fourth grade. It's just

Host: The rain had that Seattle texture—a fine, soft mist that didn’t fall so much as hover, a constant silver shimmer in the air. The streetlights glowed faintly through it, halos trembling on the pavement. It was late, maybe near midnight, and the city was quiet in the way only memory can make it quiet.

Jack and Jeeny stood on 10th Avenue, right at the top of Capitol Hill, where the road sloped down toward a small elementary school tucked between trees and brick homes. The air smelled of cedar, coffee, and rain.

Jeeny: “Stone Gossard once said, ‘I walked to Seward School first through fourth grade. It's just amazing to me now that we'd walk down 10th Avenue on Capitol Hill.’”

Jack: half-smiling, hands in pockets “Funny, isn’t it? The things that amaze us when we look back. Walking to school. Something so ordinary, so safe, now feels like another world.”

Host: The streetlight above them flickered, casting a momentary pulse of light over the wet sidewalk. A single leaf clung to Jack’s coat, trembling like a tiny relic of childhood that refused to let go.

Jeeny: “It’s not the walk he’s amazed by. It’s the trust of that time. The freedom. The innocence. Imagine being a kid and just walking through the city without fear, without phones, without noise—just the world and your little legs carrying you forward.”

Jack: “Yeah. And now you can’t let a kid walk to the end of the block without tracking them on a GPS app. Times change. Safety got traded for surveillance. Freedom for fear.”

Jeeny: “Or maybe we just forgot how to trust. That’s what nostalgia does—it shows us how much smaller our courage has become.”

Host: Her voice echoed faintly in the hollow street. The rain had slowed, now only a soft drizzle that seemed to whisper against the leaves. Jack looked down the avenue, where the faint outline of Seward School still stood—a brick building, silent and watchful.

Jack: “When I was a kid, I used to walk to school too. It wasn’t much, maybe half a mile. But it felt like crossing the world. Every puddle was a sea, every alley a mystery. You felt alive in ways you don’t as an adult.”

Jeeny: “Exactly. That’s what amazes him. That once, we trusted our small selves with the big world. We didn’t overthink it. We just lived inside the wonder.”

Jack: shrugs “Maybe wonder’s a luxury. The world got darker. Or maybe we just see it clearer now.”

Jeeny: “No. We see it narrower. Children don’t see danger first—they see possibility. They look at 10th Avenue and think about rain puddles, not headlines.”

Host: The rain thickened suddenly, sheets of it cascading across the street. Jack and Jeeny ducked under the awning of a closed café, the neon sign still buzzing, spelling Rainier Coffee in half-lit letters. The reflection of the sign danced on the wet pavement, red and gold and alive.

Jack: “You think nostalgia’s honest? Or is it just selective memory pretending to be truth?”

Jeeny: “It’s honest about feeling, not facts. You don’t remember the mud on your shoes or the cold mornings—you remember the wonder. That’s what makes nostalgia powerful—it keeps the emotion alive even when the details fade.”

Jack: “But isn’t that dangerous? We start believing the past was better just because it’s blurred.”

Jeeny: “No, Jack. We don’t worship the past because it was better. We worship it because it was simpler. Because we still had the capacity to be amazed by small things.”

Host: Her words lingered in the air, warm against the cold. Jack’s breath fogged the window behind him, and for a moment he traced something—a faint circle, like a child might do.

Jack: softly “You ever wish you could go back?”

Jeeny: “Not to be young again. Just to feel that young again. To walk down a street and have it feel like the whole world instead of just a route.”

Jack: “You think that’s possible? To feel like that again?”

Jeeny: “Maybe not in the same way. But I think that’s why people write songs like Stone Gossard’s—so they can walk those streets again in their minds. Art is how adults return to childhood without getting lost.”

Host: A bus passed, its tires slicing through the rainwater, sending a brief wave that splashed their shoes. Neither of them moved. They just stood there, watching the light trails fade into the distance.

Jack: “You know, I get it now. What amazes him isn’t the street—it’s that he made it through. That he grew up, moved on, and still remembers what it felt like to be small and fearless.”

Jeeny: smiling “Yes. To be small and fearless. That’s the part we spend our adult lives trying to remember. We think we outgrow wonder, but it’s really just sleeping in us.”

Host: The rain began to ease, leaving behind that quiet after-sound, a kind of silence filled with memory. A faint light flickered inside the old school building—perhaps just a janitor, perhaps just the ghost of every morning bell that ever rang.

Jack: “You know, when you’re a kid, walking feels infinite. You don’t think about distance, only direction. You just go. I miss that. Not the school, not the street—the certainty of just going.”

Jeeny: “Then go, Jack. Keep walking. That’s the trick. The street’s still there—it’s the walker who forgets.”

Host: The camera might have panned out then, the street stretching endlessly before them, glistening in the after-rain light, two figures small against the vastness of what once felt ordinary but now seemed sacred.

Jack: quietly “You think amazement is just memory dressed up as gratitude?”

Jeeny: “No. Amazement is gratitude rediscovered.”

Host: The wind shifted, carrying the faint smell of wet pavement and cedar, and for one long, timeless moment, the world seemed to pause—as if it, too, remembered what it was to walk, to believe, to be unafraid.

Jeeny: “Maybe that’s all life is, Jack. A long walk down our own 10th Avenue, trying to remember how it felt to be amazed just to be moving.”

Host: The camera pulled higher—over the street, the rain, the faint glow of Seward School in the distance—until Jack and Jeeny were two small silhouettes on a shining path, still walking, still talking, their voices lost to the hum of the city that had once been their childhood.

And beneath it all, the same simple truth that Stone Gossard had felt: that sometimes, the most amazing thing isn’t where you arrive,
but the innocence of the walk that got you there.