We drive in the gray car under the gray sky past gray strip malls. I don’t say anything. I think that it would be more fun to go home with another student’s family for Thanksgiving than to go home to my own. Instead of reliving boring paths I’d gone on a thousand times before, I could go see Kat’s family in Las Vegas or Vicky’s in LA. And even dreary Chicago might be more interesting to someone who’s spent their life under California’s sunny skies.
posted January 28, 2005 02:15 AM (Education) (3 comments) #
Kinda sounds like something out of The Lathe of Heaven. :-)
posted by Dale Meyer at January 28, 2005 10:52 AM #
We drive in the gray car under the gray sky past gray strip malls.
This illustrates why I both love and hate Chicago. Downtown and along the lake shore, it’s a vibrant, interesting city, a great place to go for a weekend or a conference. But the company I worked for back in the 80s had a training center in Rolling Meadows. The western suburbs were urban sprawl at their worst.
Instead of reliving boring paths I’d gone on a thousand times before,
I grew up in northwestern Ohio, but I’ve lived in Indianapolis since 1982. Sometimes all the memories of a quarter century of living here (especially the little ones like, A record store used to be here or A cute red-head used to live here) are sometimes overwhelming. If so many friends and family weren’t here, I’d think of moving somewhere else just to be able to walk down the street without so many “ghosts” haunting me. (Needless to say, I was relieved when, after 27 years, my parents moved out of the town where I grew up. Now I can visit them in peace….)
And even dreary Chicago might be more interesting to someone who’s spent their life under California’s sunny skies.
That reminds me of a business trip I had to Phoenix a few years back. One of the people I was visiting told me that it’s sunny there about 360 days a year. When THEY get a cloudy day (especially a rainy one), everyone takes off work to enjoy it. It reminds me of an old JAL advertisement that read, “One man’s sushi is another man’s steak.”
posted by Russ Schwartz at February 2, 2005 06:44 AM #