Day tripping
Writing by treason on Tuesday, 27 of February , 2007 at 3:44 pm
When I was a little kid I liked to go off by myself. One method was to leave Joyce Kilmer Elementary School in the afternoon and walk in the opposite direction of our apartment building. I’d walk on streets that I’d never walked down before and kept walking until I realized that it was either getting too cold or too dark to continue my journey. By that time I’d usually be lost. Still, I always managed to find my way home.
After I mastered a two-wheeler, I’d ride my bike instead. I’d wheel it out to the front of our building, look down the street one way, then the other, and wait for a little voice to tell me which way to go. Sometimes it was that way: I’d peddle past Pratt, Lunt, Touhy, and Jarvis towards Evanston. Sometimes it was the opposite way: I’d ride past the Granada Theatre, Loyola University, Mundelein College, and all the way past the Edgewater Beach Hotel and Apartments. I’d stop my bike and just stare, wondering if one day I’d live in that perfectly pink place.
During our year in Prescott, I walked and rode and covered as much area as I could, just to absorb my new desert landscape. I explored. I went places I didn’t know existed. Did the same in California and when I went off to college I’d get in my car and drive for hours…getting lost, but always managing to find my way home.
And now I take these little journeys without leaving the house. No, not LSD, silly. PC. I sit down at my computer and find a site that leads me to another, then another, then another, until I get to the point where I can’t remember where I started. Talk about time vampires.
Today I sat down to read a bit of NRO and was immediately sucked in. Just too many really fine articles - politics, popular culture, history, biography, film and book reviews. I finally landed on a Brookhiser piece about Washington Irving. And that led me to a memory of how much I enjoyed playing Authors when I was a kid. So I looked up the game online and saw the same deck of cards I’ve had for decades. That game was my introduction to literary genius. I then thought of all the streets I knew named after Irving and a little spot I knew called the Irvington District. Irving had also lived in Sunnyside. I knew of a Sunnyside or two and ended up following that lead to a website belonging to an artist who graduated from my university the year I started there and paints well, yet way wacky. I liked what I saw. From his site I found his web designer’s that listed eclectic links - some decidedly Libertarian - and somehow ended up looking at architecture in Rotterdam. Specifically something called the Urban Cactus housing project. In two hours I’d traveled from New York to the West Coast, up 101 to Seattle, then over to the Netherlands.
These jaunts have become for me quick trips down Memory Lane. I can retrace my childhood journeys, leave my elementary school website and go from there. It’s how I discovered the fate of the Granada and the Edgewater Beach Hotel. Sometimes I look at places I’ve been and buildings I’ve seen and it’s a big colorful scrapbook without the paper and paste.
So today I was in Rotterdam. I stood on a flower-lined terrace and watched clouds roll over boats in the harbor. One long trip from the high desert. It didn’t get cold, it didn’t get dark, my legs didn’t hurt, but I did get very, very lost.
Still, I managed to find my way home again.
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