I took a stroll down Memory Lane today and I mean literally and not figuratively. Cat has a 30 minute saxophone lesson every Wednesday night and 30 minutes isn’t enough time to go home, but is too long to sit in the car and be bored. Most nights I go to the mall or the bookstore and look around and usually end up spending money I don’t have on stuff I don’t need. Today I decided to do something different and use the time to walk.
Walking in a neighborhood that isn’t your own is an interesting experience and can lead to some dead ends. The first block I turned down landed me in an apartment complex’s parking lot and I had to decide whether to walk through the complex or turn around. It was a nice day and a safe looking complex, so I decided to keep walking to get to the road on the other side. The complex was well kept and folks had made the most of their small yards. I saw potted plants sitting out, a collection of kids’s toys, and other items that made me realize that people had chosen to make these apartments real homes.
Coming out of the apartment complex, I was in what had probably once been one of the booming subdivisions built after World War II with cute little cookie cutter homes, tree lined streets, and interesting names for the streets. Some of the streets have Native American names like We-Go and Wappello, others are named for early settlers like Emerson and Rand, and then there are the names that are just plain cute like Memory Lane.
Memory Lane is a typical Northwest Suburban Chicago street lined with bungalows and ranch houses. The cars in the driveways are a mix of imports and domestics and the signs of suburban bliss are everywhere with Halloween decorations starting to appear in lawns, dogs barking in backyards, and kitschy statues out in the front yards.
Suburban bliss is an interesting thing because the original reason for suburbs was to give people room to spread out and get away from the claustrophobic highrises and narrow streets of downtown. However, ex-urbanites aren’t comfortable driving more than a few miles for the necessities of every day life like Borders and Starbucks so today the suburbs look like lowrise versions of downtown with stores, shops, and housing filling what was once cornfields. Interestingly enough, some suburbanites have taken to growing corn in their minuscule gardens. That got me thinking about how no matter how civilized we are, at heart we are all still hunter gatherers.
All too soon my timer went off and it was time to head back to the music store and reclaim my daughter and my own life and leave behind the bliss of wandering down someone else’s Memory Lane.
Cairn by Cairn 