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.")
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.
ReplyDeleteAnd what, pray tell, were the electric monstrosities doing at the time?
Were they playing with your head?
So, is that out in Bat Country?
ReplyDeleteToo much time on the Hidden Frontier?
ReplyDeleteDunno 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.
ReplyDeleteNot 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?
Something. Something for sure.
ReplyDeleteKeurig'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.
ReplyDeleteWe also started buying the brands that use a soft mesh mod, not the plastic ones with a paper filter inside. Last longer.
I saw a documentary long ago about a similar glass-faced office tower.
ReplyDeleteThe 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.
You're thinking of London's "Walkie-Talkie" building, I suspect.
ReplyDeleteIn 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.
You know, if I saw the sun rising in the wrong place, I'd be ducking and covering.
ReplyDeleteFor 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.
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.
ReplyDeleteI hope all is well, or at least on the mend.