Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Where The Streets Know My Name

I’ve lived in the same place for 30 years.
Not some big city like New York or Chicago
, just a small Alabama town of 50,000 people.
I always wondered what it would be like to live someplace else. Part of me thinks that it might be kind of sad.
See I’ve lived here so long that after awhile the place turned into a living novel. Almost as if I had written my biography, ripped the pages out, and hidden them across the landscape.

Every building, tree, and back road holds a chapter hidden somewhere under a rock or a new coat of paint.

The 3 year old me waves from the park where I chipped my tooth on the merry-go-round. My dad was with me that day.

The field where a 17 year old goof and 9 of his closet friends made an attempt at cow tipping. We got ran off by a vicious dog that we never saw and only heard from a distance.

I drive past the old grocery store where a cashier met his future wife 6 years before their first date. The shadows of friends long moved on still hang around the parking lot.

The bad memories are there too… there was a time when I thought maybe a change of scenery would hide the mistakes and scars of my past. Then I turn a corner or take a different route to work and a new story with a familiar cast blows past me like leaves before a storm. Man, I got a lot of stories to tell Baby Fred.

5 more days till Baby Fred arrives….

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