On our way to the family Cottage we passed Grand Rapids, a big city in Michigan that was absolutely worth putting my book down, they all agreed. And by all I mean Loo and Loo’s grandma hereto referred to as Gammy. We passed a large brick building that was close to the expressway--in Cali we call those freeways. It was shockingly close. It had to be some trick of the brain, of the eye, of something. Nobody in their right mind would put a building that close to a major freeway/expressway.
This building we passed was so close I had to look at it twice and Gammy said, “That building there is the closest building to an expressway in all of America.” This warranted another look--total looks for the building now: three. The building’s corner was so close to the freeway that I bet if someone stopped their car, got out, walked over to the edge and reached out to the building they could touch the bricks.
As we approached in the new Toyota Sienna I saw that they were pink bricks, scoured by the wind of passing cars and semi trucks. I bet someone could have touched it from the freeway.
I wanted to be that someone. To be that man that walked out on that country freeway and reached out and felt that pink brick, the pink mortar, and those rectangular holes where bricks use to be before they fell. I wondered how often they fell, and if anyone was hurt.
I wondered how a building got to be so close to a major freeway. Would anything like that happen in Cali? No, our reinforced concrete buildings are far enough away from the freeway and isolated from the vibration of passing cars with their own freeways exits. Didn't American civilization start on the east coast and grow towards the west. By the time it got there some planning was done to build the new cities and their skyscrapers equidistance from one another and the roads. But on the east side of the USA you can find brick roads, strangely paved streets and randomly placed old buildings. Like when I was driving around the low-cost houses around Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, they all seem to be different: different layouts, different heights, different colors and different materials. In Cali a low-cost house is around $250,000, the equivalent of a Michigan mansion. It would be sandwiched between other identically colored, textured, sized houses which have two or three different internal layouts. The lawns would be the same size, the garages too, and the backyards for that matter. It’s just different. I prefer the diverse houses peppering Kalamazoo for a quarter of the cost of cookie cutter Cali houses. In fact as I drive by I am always looking at them, into them, and find it amazing that next to that house is another differently styled house, maybe made out of stone, or brick or stained wood, or painted green, blue, yellow or pink, with a porch with Hellenistic columns, or not, with a garden full of tulips or a giant rusted anchor.
We just stopped at a Meijers gas station but there was no meijers store attached to it. I went inside the little kwik-e mart attached to it loking for a composition book because I forgot mine and wanted to jot some things down. Loo wanted to come too, like we were going to go on an adventure. We marched with purpose into the little mart and walked its internal perimeter once, but before I could walk the second Loo said, “Bummer Bear (the nickname she has given me, long story that has nothing to do with being furry) Looks like they don’t have any.”
“Yeah,” I said and kept walking, I wanted to be sure.
“They don’t have any, come on little bear.”
“Hold on let me check this corner.”
“I looked already they don’t have any.”
“Will you let me look?”
“They don’t have any, come on.”
“Alright already,” I said as I followed her out the door. It annoyed me on a level it shouldn’t have.
I took a breath, put myself in her shoes and looked at me, this tall writer boy on a mission to find a composition book in a gas station. How fruitless it would be, it isn’t an item they sell at gas stations. How she must have looked in the places I hadn’t, found nothing and asked me to go back to the car before Gammy finished filling it up. Had she heard the whining in my voice? Had it given her pause, my reluctance to leave, to be sure that this gas station was without composition books? Had I annoyed her with my childlike whining? Her repeated statements to leave were more motherly than annoyed, like I was being a little kid. How is it that women have the ability to use that mother-like tone and say something and have an effect on me so that I simply acquiesce to whatever she is saying. Maybe it’s a role thing, because I’m being a whiny kid, she has to be the unaffected mother? Didn’t I read somewhere that men seek out women to marry who are just like their mothers? I did. Who wrote that? Where did I read that? I can’t remember. Random memory: Mom saying, “Men want to marry virgins, while they play the field. How do they expect to find these virgin women I wonder?”
1 comment:
I have read that somewhere before as well... and I can't remember either. A lot of people say that too, men look for women who, in some way, resemble their mother... perhaps not entirely their mother? Perhaps it is just that women can be very motherly?
I don't know... But I know, that I always use to play a mother-like role when I was with my son's dad. For everything I would always be like "did you remember to..." "Don't forget..." I remember someone told me: "men will always be boys." And well.. from my experience that is true. lol... he was a boy... his dad is also still a boy. But not everybody is the same, so who knows.
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