0-3 on Sunday. It started with the French Open, where we were hoping to see Roger Federer take another step towards a Grand Slam. I don’t understand how Rafael Nadal is comfortable running around the court in those capris, but — hey — it works for him. Next, the Mets were emasculated by the Tigers. We did score a touchdown and a PAT, but they got two TD’s, a PAT, and a two-point conversion. Later that night it was the San Antonio Spurs schooling the Cleveland Cavaliers in game 2 of the NBA Finals. Spent most of the day out in the yard, running back into the house occasionally to check the scores, so the sunstroke-induced wooziness helped to take the edge off the losses. Can Cleveland win one game? What will DP’s reception be in the city of light, city of magic?
Scoop writes in Dogs in Ice Cream Parlors:
Dan may be happy our Cavs are in the Finals, but if he really is, it would be nice for him to lay off the insults to Cleveland. The other day he made a doozy with Rick Reilly–they were talking about the contrroversy over the size of a LeBron James banner downtown and he said something to the effect of “Come on, this is Cleveland–wouldn’t you want to cover it up as much as possible?” Reilly actually came to the city’s defense, saying it was “not that bad.”
Dan, my man. You will be here soon, and it will not be a comfortable stay for you if too many people here know you said that. Before you know it, they may start hurling the jokes at you that Northern Ohioans fling at Southern Ohioans. You really don’t want that, do you? I didn’t think so.
Cleveland as epithet?
Tory wrote in Man, I hate making those phones calls.:
I know this is, in the lifespan of the internet, sort of an old post, but I hear you on the New York City thing — though I’d have to argue that it is still an epithet. I left for school in NYC this past summer, and every person in my sleepy upstate town I told this too had the same raised-eyebrow look of surprise, and more than one suggested arming myself, as though I were walking into a war zone.
I’ve felt safer in most parts of the city than I did in Syracuse. So while the city itself has changed, I don’t know how much public perception has. …
Thanks for the blast-from-the-past comment; it reminded me of when I left home for NYU. (And sorry for the tardy follow-up; I’m not exactly timely with the blog posts here, or in any aspect of my life.) After I wrote the post I wasn’t sure if “epithet” was the best word to use, but I’m glad it resonated with you. I never realized what a great divide there is between upstate New Yorkers and people in the City. And of course when one says “the City” everyone knows you mean New York City and not Albany or Poughkeepsie. It’s funny how provincial people are over where they live.
A Verlyn Klinkenborg piece in the Times brought me back to the topic of place:
Whenever I drive across country, I carry a single question with me, and I ask it over and over again. Could I live here?
(See end of this post for full text of the article.)
I like to think I could live anywhere. I have had the good fortune to have lived in a variety of places, from those that elicit a jealous “WOW! You lived there?” to those that get spat upon with a disparaging “Oh my God. How could you live there?” Amusingly, New York City falls into both extremes.
Geographic one-upsmanship recalls sports fandom. It’s not enough to love your team, you have to hate the other team. Same with politics: I can’t just support my candidate, yours has to be incarnation of evil. I can’t simply be happy with where I live, your town has to absolutely suck.
But some places don’t want to be noticed in a positive way, to make any of those “Best Places to Live” lists. People in Seattle are appalled with the number of Californians migrating north. Oregon had the slogan Don’t Californicate Oregon a while back.
Scoop, maybe you need to get a bunch of “Don’t Dan Patrickize Cleveland.”
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Editorial Observer
Pondering Some Old, Familiar Questions on the Road Across Country
May 30, 2007
By Verlyn Klinkenborg
The tires whine, and sometimes they moan. Sometimes they send up a whistle I don’t even hear until it stops. Now and then the asphalt runs smooth and true. But mostly the interstate is a series of discontinuities — a sharp thump as we hit a shallow overpass, a few miles partly paved with recycled rubber, a long sequence in western Nebraska where the tires make the sound of the special effects in Walter Mitty’s mind. And then there is Omaha, where the freeway looks smooth but is really a dozen heavily corrugated miles that must drive the truckers insane.
In imagination, Interstate 80 is a single line, the shortest practical distance between San Francisco and New York. To be at any one point on that line is to feel the length of the whole, as if the only here that matters is the here you come upon when you’re finally there. I get so used to watching the landscape zoom past us that I lose track of the fact that we’re the ones zooming along while the landscape stays perfectly still.
I think of that when we come to the Nebraska grasslands. A windmill is pumping water into a stock tank surrounded by cattle. The grass is bent low. These are reminders that the wind is more than just the breeze of our passing, the bucking windstorm that follows a semi. This is a native wind, quartering down stiffly out of the northwest. This is the wind that everyone who lives here learns to live with.
Whenever I drive across country, I carry a single question with me, and I ask it over and over again. Could I live here? It’s natural enough, I suppose — a central question for a species whose habitat is defined as much by imagination and emotion as it is by strict biological constraints. It’s a question that raises the matter of time as much as place.
Cutting across central Wyoming, I look up a draw and see a sheltered spot under the hills where the sagebrush breaks into grass, and I think, “I could live there.” And I could, now, because living anywhere has been made so easy in our time. It’s no longer really a problem of physical limits — how far you have to haul water and salt and flour, how long you can go without company. But what I’m really asking when I wonder “Could I live here?” is “Who would I be if I did live here?” To that question I never know the answer.
Some places seem obviously unlivable to me, like Jeffrey City, a nearly abandoned town in the middle of Wyoming that sprang up during a uranium boom and died a couple of decades later. The answer is equally no along the southern fringe of Cheyenne, where a new Jeffrey City is being built thanks to the petroleum boom that has turned the state upside down.
But when I find myself asking “Could I live here?,” I usually get a more equivocal answer, and it is the uncertainty that sets me thinking. I see an abandoned farmhouse on the high plains, a broken down corral, the ruins of a few old cottonwoods, and I can imagine hearing the notes of a meadowlark being carried away on the wind as I go to work on the place. I have to remind myself that in this simple experiment in relativity — I am the observer traveling at 75 m.p.h. — I cannot allow myself to imagine living anywhere I can see from my current position. But what if it were a place just like this and over the horizon, out of the sight of so much movement?
Perhaps this is a mental game that everyone plays — a way to test the life you are actually living. You drive through a small town at night and wonder what it would be like to feel at home in one of those houses where only the bedroom lamp is still shining. You wonder what your own life would look like if you could somehow stand outside it as a stranger.
But what this question always confirms in me is something I must have understood when my wife and I decided to settle on a small farm in the country. Driving across America, I see place after place I can happily imagine living. And what I notice is that they are mostly uninhabited places.
So Nebraska comes to an end, and the next day we drive into Iowa, where I have already lived a good part of my life. It has been raining since dawn, and now the wind is pounding down from the north. There is water standing in every row on the hillside fields, and it has begun to cut across and run down to the creeks and rivers, carrying Iowa away to the Gulf of Mexico. Two more days on the road and we will be back in the place where I no longer wonder if I could live there because this is the place it turns out I live.
