Yesterday, I did what I do during typical mid-week lunch breaks, when the work piles up light fixture high and so does my appetite for all things rich. Basically, I took a luxurious three-hour lunch. Champagne, oysters, white napkins and a comped check, all with an understanding that in the course of time it would be paid in full.
At some point between cannoli and espresso, I called my driver, David to pull around back. He was waxing the wheels and wasting my time at time, something I pay him to do on a daily basis. With that finished, we headed for an aimless drive. Any meetings would be dialed in from the backseat, sated on bivalves and bubbly.
We took an impromptu cruise to the old neighborhood, a place I hadn’t seen in fourteen or so years. At first, I was excited, jumping out of my recently moisturized skin. Then I saw things that were different, things that I didn’t understand. What happened to the neon sign over Ralph’s Hardware store? When did we start using LEDs? Yeah, I can still use "we." The creamery was gone. The creamery, can you believe it? I thought this place had a strong sense of historic preservation. Apparently not.
The whole experience made me angry and confused. This wasn’t the town I remembered, and this wasn’t the town I grew up in. Some years had passed and necessary improvements had made, but the famous pothole on Main Street. Did they really have to fill that in? I heard people from up and down the East Coast visited and paid their respects, tossing dandelion greens into it, saying a prayer and making a wish. The Pothole on Main was our Oracle at Delphi. It’s gone, paved over, like most of my better memories. What am I supposed to do for good luck? Church? Synagogue? Find a natural sinkhole?
The town’s resident artistic genius had a bunch of new canvases for sale. But his style had changed and it bothered me. Why couldn’t he be happy with where he was fourteen years ago and never change? I always felt Dylan should’ve stayed acoustic, too. There’s another author in town who wrote this great children’s book and drove his scooter off a scenic overlook after the book party. Too many oysters, I think. But he never declined. As an artist, that is. The fall was a steep decline. A couple hundred feet if memory serves.
When I go to a museum I’m not interested in the artist’s personal vision. What I want is how their style aligns with my own preconceived, rather narrow notions of the world. If I’m the one standing in front of it, shouldn’t it be my perspective that's taken into consideration?
Where'd the neighborhood go?
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