Monday, January 29, 2007

I Love this Town


My friend Carl Boerger took this shot this morning at sunrise. Thanks, for sharing, dude!
Houston is hot most of the year and humid all of the year. The traffic is bad, and the city is not known for it's beauty. But there is much to love about Houston.

I remember leaving town the first year I lived here and my return flight afforded me a similar view of our skyline. I liked the glad feeling in my heart that said, "I'm home!" and I always thrill to see this sky line when I fly back in. After all, lots of people I love live here!

Some days I pine for my home in North Carolina and I suppose I always will. There are lots people I love there, too. Mostly I think the pining is nostalgia, that funny emotion that operates between truth and perception, tricking us to remember things better than they actually were. Billy Joel wrote, "The good old days weren't always good and tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems," and Thomas Wolfe said, "You can never go home." They are mostly right, I think.

Idealizing a person, place, time, or thing is the most treacherous game on the emotional playground, especially if you allow yourself to make decisions about real life with little basis in actual fact. Your old boyfriend/girlfriend was neither that great nor that horrible, your dead mother/father was neither saint nor psychopath, and your old elementary school is always, always, always smaller than you remember.

The old saying goes, "The grass is greener on the other side." I say the grass is greener were you water it, mow it, fertilize it, and weed it.

At least that's the way it works here in Houston.

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