Tuesday, August 12, 2003

Our Childhoods

Mom says she likes it when I write like this. She says I should write something like it every day.

James Lilek writes something like that almost every day, only longer and better written. Yesterday he wrote about going home to Fargo. Today he continued his visit.

Since James grew up at the same time as I, his memories remind me of mine. We shopped at Ben Franklin. We went to Sambo's when I was a kid. I think we actually had "a clever colored boy" on our menus, rather than Fargo's Brahmin Sambo. Kansas City has been called the most northern city in the South, so I guess the corporate heads at Sambo's thought the clever colored boy would play well here, although I have always lived on the Free-State side of town, which I guess would be the most southern city in the North. But here in the smallest metro in the Major Leagues nearly all of the Sixties was wiped away by progress, so you really have to look to see what remains. When I go the Toon Shop in Prairie Village that old strip mall brings vague memories of how it was back then to the surface, disrupted only by the Wendy's around the corner. Driving along Johnson Drive in Mission has the same effect. I like the progress, but I also liked the Sixties.