It was a good day. I had committed to returning to the college to sign some papers in order to teach in the spring. Why not travel my once daily commute in a brand new way, why not see it with new eyes. Why not go on a PhotoSafari?
For over thirty years I traveled the twenty plus miles safely, and sometimes hypnotically. What I mean to say is that some of my mind was working out the issues of the day, while the other part of my brain was dealing with the turns and straightaways. Not the most comforting thought, to “wake up” in the driveway with no idea how you got there. Okay, it didn’t happen a lot, but it happened enough to scare me.
Today I decided to see it new for the first time. I really enjoyed it. I also realized it was taking a lot of time. I was stopping to look a lot. I even took pictures. It is, and was, a beautiful commute. A suburban community on one end, a lakeside drive in the middle, and a working class neighborhood on the other end. Pretty remarkable, and it’s a shame that I overlooked it as often as I did.
While still on safari! I stopped at a nearby park that I had last visited about fifty years ago. Wow, so that was a round up exaggeration, it was forty-nine years ago. I remember the huge indoor roller skating rink, some really cool stonework all around, and some other mysterious smaller buildings of unknown function. They were all gone. The only thing left was the 1934ish WPA stonework, and the stone obelisks that were the lamp posts of the day. The odd thing was that the wiring and lights were long gone, and the paths that they lit were mostly gone as well. So I spent an hour hunting the Wild Obelisk, finding them in the usual spots, and finding them in the unusual spots as well.
It was a good day.
