Road Trip: Day 7
After last night's alcohol-soaked bachelor party events, the WS found himself tired today. And with fatigue comes meditative. And with home geography comes nostalgic. Took my partner to the city's international festival this evening, to eat fattening Hungarian food and too-rich saganaki made by old Greek women, and to listen to other languages in conversations at the tables around us. Then we drove through the grand old neighborhoods of the city's east side, gawking at stately brick manors that sell for a quarter of a million bucks or more. Then later, a dog walk through my mother's neighboorhood, past the old elementary school where I pretended to be an ace baseball pitcher in an imaginary stadium, and then back on to the street of my youth, past the falling-apart houses that used to shelter the families I knew as a child.
The longer I stay away from this town, the more it haunts my imagination.
Into Don Quixote. Page 111.
About Me
- The Whining Stranger
- I am a bookish, neurotic type. Clinically anxious, musically inclined. I love jazz and sport and scotch and modern art and satellite radio and the people close to me (more than those other things). I have multiple versions of the same shirt and would sell my soul (well, figuratively) for a Karman Ghia. Sushi, a hoppy IPA, and an old Woody Allen movie in the DVD player or Thelonious Monk on the stereo and I'm in my happy place.
7 comments:
Your description sounds really lovely, very movie-like. I can picture the scene - the festival and the drive like a slow moving montage.
My practical side is aghast that any stately mansion anywhere sells for $250,000. You can't buy a hovel here for that. I'm moving.
Manor, I said, not mansion. Manor, to me = those big brick homes you see in John Hughes films.
Mansions here are clearly in excess of a million. Or more.
Manor, mansion...technicalities!
;-) Still sounds like a steal to me. And in a city! Oh, and John Hughes movies. You've sold me. Ever think about moving back?
Well, I don't know about moving back. It's out of my hands, given that I work in a profession that has extremely limited mobility. This is something I find myself explaining to various family members while I'm here--why college professors don't just work wherever they'd LIKE to geographically. Sigh.
Yes, like book editors :-)! But if you could?
I love where I live, but I think about moving different places all the time. For one thing, almost everywhere else is cheaper to live. I could have an amazing old house (for some reason, always less money than the new ones everywhere but here) for less than my 50 year old house is worth now. When we travel, we read the real estate section. We go to open houses here, too. I think we just have a thing for buildings.
I like houses. I like buildings. I don't like where I live. Ironically, one of the few perks of [unnamed college town] is that the housing is fairly affordable. One of the few perks. If I had my way, I don't think I'd live in [hometown] but I'd live closer. But not somehwere where family can drop in at a moment's notice. You know what I'm saying, people. Family--God love 'em--are good with a little distance.
I love the last line of your post. I feel like that everytime I visit my parents.
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