Tripping back home
So this is it: the obligatory trip home. I try to make it back about every two years. Give or take. If you don’t live in the place where you used to, you’ll share that feeling that comes whenever you go back. It just looks and feels all different.
In the case of my suburban Kansas City hometown, the difference is in the sheer amount of urban sprawl. Where I grew up was in the middle of nowhere. Outside the city limits. In between four farms. I had to get a car as soon as I was old enough (and fourteen was old enough!) because there wasn’t any other way to get to high school (about 8 miles away) or work (the dairy queen, about 5 miles in the other direction). My senior year, our high school moved into a new building that seemed huge for a little place (our graduating class had 96 students. memorable because it was 1996.) but now it is too small for the town. A town that I remember having one pizza place (Gambinos, which had a juke box with ice, ice baby and can’t touch this as well as an Elvira pinball machine) and one bbq restaurant that was actually in a converted house. There was one place to get groceries and one place to get your hair cut, but you had a choice of two places to fill up your car. One of which was referred to by the initials of the owners, something that seems to be completely normal in small town america. As in, I’ve got to stop at C&H or I’m not going to make it to Jefferson. It was not uncommon for me to (partially) fill my little red Ford Escort with two or three dollars of gas, cobbled together from change found between the couch cushions. And that would drive me back and forth to school for about two weeks. It goes without saying that I drove on very, very few paved roads as a teenager.
Of course this place is totally different now. The roads are paved. There are plenty of shops, including more grocery stores and chain restaurants like Subway and Pizza Hut, even. I don’t think there is a Starbucks in the high school cafeteria just yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is there some time next year.
But somethings never change. Good people, good places. Going back always reminds me of how much I love where I live now, but it was good to have some time to see this place again. Thanks for people who helped make that happen. More trip pictures here
xlovesx
Read more about:
Next post: Curing jet lag
Previous post: It's actually a very small number. Very small.
