Education Quote by Stone Gossard

Nostalgia lands here without any of the usual syrup. Stone Gossard isn’t romanticizing childhood so much as marveling at a vanished set of assumptions: that a kid could move through a city on foot, day after day, and that this felt ordinary. The power of the line sits in its casual specificity - “Seward School,” “first through fourth grade,” “10th Avenue,” “Capitol Hill” - a map pinning memory to real pavement. That concreteness is the tell: this isn’t a mythic “back then,” it’s a neighborhood before it became a brand.

“It’s just amazing to me now” is the hinge. The amazement isn’t about distance; it’s about cultural drift. Capitol Hill, especially in the Seattle story, has shifted from livable, slightly scruffy, and porous to expensive, surveilled, and optimized. What once read as normal childhood independence now registers as risky, or at least unimaginable, in an era shaped by stranger-danger media cycles, traffic violence, and the quiet privatization of public space. The subtext is less “we were tougher” than “the world got less forgiving.”

Coming from a musician tied to Seattle’s late-80s/90s boom, the quote also carries an unspoken before-and-after of the city itself: the pre-tech, pre-hyper-gentrified landscape that incubated scenes because it left room - economically and psychologically - for kids to wander and for artists to linger. Walking becomes a shorthand for freedom, and for a community scaled to humans rather than to returns.