MEXICO CITY — My travels have a way of conjuring ghosts. Not the “Friday the 13th” scary kind, but the commercial sort — brands I’d assumed were dead and buried but weren’t. Sightings of such ghosts fill me with Technicolor memories.

Look at Sears Roebuck, for example.

Once commanding more than 3,500 stores, Sears dominated American retail with its appliances, tires, tools, and its catalogue thick as the Yellow Pages. But the Chicago giant couldn’t keep pace with Target and Kohl’s, nimbler competitors who carved out their spaces in the multibillion-dollar consumer market. Sears became what industry analysts called a “zombie brand”— technically alive but hardly thriving.

Yet, there Sears was here, a block from Chinatown. From the outside, it looked like the Sears stores from my boyhood. I doubt it carried the same merchandise as it once did, and I’m certain millennials barely remember it.

RadioShack fell into this category, too. The consumer-electronics chain was everywhere until the mid-’80s, and it had a bigger footprint than Best Buy. Now, RadioShack is mostly a memory in America, though brands like it don’t always disappear, they migrate.

Now take Kmart, which once rivaled Walmart. It’s gone from the American landscape, but it prospers in Australia.

While in Tokyo two years ago, I encountered Lawson’s Dairy — not one store, but dozens. These weren’t knock-offs but legitimate Lawson’s stores, minus the fresh-squeezed Florida orange juice. Founded in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1939, the convenience chain struggled stateside before Dairy Mart acquired it in 1985.

Then it vanished from American streets.

Some brands disappear completely. Laub Baking Co. on Lorain Avenue is gone forever. So is Hough Bakeries, whose Lakeview Road plant once filled the neighborhood around it with fresh-baked smells. Those are lost to time.

I’m not trying to romanticize what was. Businesses come and go; they always have.

Remember F.W. Woolworth? If you’re a millennial, probably not. The five-and-dime closed before you were old enough to remember.

In the mid-’90s, after I’d left teaching at Ohio University, the Woolworth store on Court Street shut its doors. A Chinese buffet occupies that space now. Nothing remains of Woolworth in America, but it thrives in South Africa and Australia.

None of these companies would’ve crossed my mind if not for my visit to Mexico City last month. For those of us of a certain vintage, memories of Toys “R” Us and Thom McAn cling like Velcro to the back of my brain. It doesn’t take much to yank them forward.

Is this just an old man’s fancy?

My friends say yes. So what? I’ll hold to my fancies when I can. What harm do they do?

I wish I’d gone inside that Sears instead of walking past. I do regret not entering, because Sears meant something to me: My father bought me my first baseball glove at the Carnegie Avenue store in Cleveland.

Lawson’s carries weight too. One sat behind the house where I grew up, its bright lights streaming into my bedroom window nightly. How could I forget that?

Well, I can’t.

There’s something delightful about discovering pieces of your past — just not where you left them, living a surprising second life in corners of the world you’d never anticipate.