Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Cognitive Dissonance In America's Richest Bedroom Community

     I'm not kidding about either one; Mom X, by virtue of the power of annexation, lives in Carmel, IN, the wealthiest little city in the nation.  As it happens, her corner of it used to be a collection of shacky little houses, dog runs, and pickup trucks mostly up on blocks, with a name you'll still find on maps (Homeplace) but lacking incorporation; but by the Sixties, they'd thrown up some nice subdivisions outside the auto-body-shop and greasy-spoon core of the un-town, and that's where Mom and Dad X came home to roost[1] in the mid-1980s.

       Enter the Nineties, and the Highway 31 corridor that formed the western boundary of Homeplace sprouted office towers like feral hemp springs up in a northern-Indiana ditch.  By the Noughties, hospitals and medical centers followed and these days, from about 91st street to well past 131st, there's a great big wall of suit & stethoscope voodoo lining the highway like a City of Gold gone wrong.

     Now comes Your Heroine, struggling with the electric monstrosities of an induction cooktop and a Keurig[2], squinting northwest out the west-facing kitchen window at the arc-welder glare of--  The rising sun?  Well yes and no, too:  the good old sun still rises in the East, even in this howling, savage-haunted wasteland, and reflects most harshly from the glittering mirrorshaded office tower a block north and two streets over, and right into Mom X's kitchen window.

     But I swear to you, for just a moment the entire Earth spun and swung, unmoored beneath my unfamiliarly slipper-socked soles.
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1. Hey, didn't I just use that already?  Ah, well.  It was entirely true for Dad: a brisk walk back to the center of the community took you, until they pushed it over a few years ago, to the little brick house where he, a half-dozen brothers, on sister and a few cousins had grown up, while a walk about as far in the other direction reached the more-rural corner where once has stood the house in which he was born.  Mom X lived on the good side of the tracks in Carmel proper, a bit too far to walk, and only since Jr. High.  But the place is certainly well within their teenaged watershed, for all that it was a woodland back then.

2. I'm sure that's also the name of a city in Turonistan, where Turk Turon once served as Mayor, Chief of Police, Dogcatcher and restaurateur.  (Hint: avoid the "catch of the day.")

10 comments:

  1. the rising where it shouldn't...it would be disconcerting. Especially if you have lots of memories of seeing sunset out that window, before someone stuck a glass-sided high rise in the way.

    And what, pray tell, were the electric monstrosities doing at the time?

    Were they playing with your head?

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  2. Too much time on the Hidden Frontier?

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  3. Dunno about induction cooktops. Have had to fiddle with one only once, and it was non-inuitive, for those of us used to the more mundane type stoves. OTOH, I hear they heat things faster.

    Not too fond of Keurig. Maybe, for emergencies, keeping a micro Chemex in the Needle of Inquiry with the bug-out gear would be an idea? Or even a single-cup drip basket?

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  4. Keurig's're OK. We got some My-Caps which let us reuse the pods with regular ground coffee of whatever provenance -- and, in Seattle, you're ALWAYS getting coffee as a gift.
    We also started buying the brands that use a soft mesh mod, not the plastic ones with a paper filter inside. Last longer.

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  5. I saw a documentary long ago about a similar glass-faced office tower.

    The architect wanted an organic appearance, so had penned a parabolic curved face to the building.

    In summer, there were parking spaces out front where your car would melt.

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  6. You're thinking of London's "Walkie-Talkie" building, I suspect.

    In red Keurigae: I have a little plastic sputnik with a filter inside that lets the thing make acceptable coffee; it's just figuring out the controls: unless things are done in the right order, it just sits there, mocking me.

    Induction cooktops: simply wrong. There is a reason we have gas laid on.

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  7. You know, if I saw the sun rising in the wrong place, I'd be ducking and covering.

    For all the good it would do me. But I was a cold war kid and early training dies hard.

    And yes, electric cooking is evil, and that IS why we have gas laid on.

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  8. Roberta, given that you are greeting the rising sun (in whatever direction or dimension you currently inhabit) I take it that you are spending time with your mom.

    I hope all is well, or at least on the mend.

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