BETHESDA, Md. - I walk softly down familiar streets made strange by the years. My mind spools in reverse, slowly, like a trout line hiking a stream. Thirty years. It has been that long.

Do-ers look forward. Dreamers look back. I dream.

It is 1970, I am 12. It is 9 o'clock on a summer morning in late June. The season stretches before me like a promise. I rise from the bed built under the eaves, in the house built in 1935, two stories, brick, with ivy covering its face. A good, sturdy middle-class house.

I walk down the stairs. The air is hot already, and moist, a Washington, D.C., summer breath. On the china cupboard is a quarter for the day.

My parents are gone to work. My older brother and sister are asleep. What to do today?

Everything and nothing. A kid's day in summer. The only responsibilities are to have fun, do good and be home by 6.

Get on the bike, the Stingray with the butterfly handlebars and the banana seat. Down Lambeth Road, up York to Wilson Lane, to my friend Fred's. Fred is 46 now, a recovering alcoholic. In 1970, he is 14 and smiling. We watch Lucy on reruns, eat some cereal, get on our bikes and ride downtown.

Maybe we'll go play pinball at Empire Music. Maybe we'll put our bikes in the parking garage elevator and take the elevator to the roof, then ride down. Maybe we'll go to the rec center and play skittles or bumper pool. Maybe we'll go to High's and swipe baseball cards. Do as we say, kids, not as we did.

Or maybe we'll sit on the grass, stare at the sky and talk about nothing. Never guessing these were the good old days. Never realizing the joy and wonder in being a kid on a summer day. Never knowing. Until now.

I'm sorry. Are you still there?

Yes? Good.

Let's go down to the Baronet Theatre for a matinee. It's a buck. Then over to the pet shop, where we can throw Red-Hots into the tropical fish tank. Red-Hots were little cinnamon candies. They really made those fish dance.

Over to the pool hall. Sweep the floor for a quarter, Mr. Thomas? Get the quarter, drop it in the pinball machine. Buy a big Coke. Plot how we'd spend the night at each other's houses.

We spent a lot of time doing nothing much. It was the best time of our lives.

The Bengals played in Baltimore last week. The only thing good about that was I went home for a few hours. I lived in Bethesda four years; I've lived in Cincinnati for 14.

Bethesda is home. Home to my nation of memories. It's in my bones like a winter wind.

Lots of kids think their place was the best place to grow up, and I have no argument with them. Maybe they feel as I do, that they could live in a place for 50 years as an adult, and it still wouldn't be the neighborhood.

It wouldn't have that summer mood, that spot under the eaves close to your heart.

Downtown Bethesda is changed: No pool hall, no Empire Music, no High's, no Baronet.

The pet shop is history, just like those Red-Hotted fish. Bethesda put in a light rail station and got sophisticated overnight: Ethnic restaurants, coffee bars, valet parking.

Towns are like sharks. Move forward or die. They don't exist to feed the daydreams of silly nostalgia.

New kids are there now, making memories of their own.

But I know what I know, and my memory is keen. Bethesda is where the covenant I made with eternal youth is never broken. Just re-arranged.

"I grew up in this place,'' I said to Leo, the counterman at the Tastee Diner, the only place in Bethesda not unhinged by the years. Formica countertop smothered in stacks of plates, red and white, coffee cups and saucers. Red and white tile on the floor, booths made of black wood and red Naugahyde lining the walls, each booth with its own jukebox. Now playing: Donna, by Ritchie Valens.

Big-armed grill man handling 10 orders at once, omelets to tuna melts, a singular form of genius. The Tastee takes me back to when I was 12 and eating a doughnut at sunrise, after delivering the Sunday Washington Star.

"Lots of people grew up in this place,'' Leo said.

I know: One summer to a customer.

I might not trade a year now, for a week back then. But I'd think about it.

E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com