Neighbor Guy
City People. Urban Living. Other Stuff.
A Tale of Two Cities: (A quintessential urban oasis and the one where you live)
It is true enough that not all cities were created equal. Not every urban setting is blessed by spellbinding natural beauty or up to its ears in high culture.
It could even be argued that certain city dwellers the world over have, to put it delicately, gotten the shaft. In the court of How’s That Fair Anyway? residents of, say, Erie, Pennsylvania could make a legitimate case against their Parisian counterparts every time.
Put enough people in any given space, however, and good things are bound to happen. Bad things are also bound to happen, but that’s a subject for another day.
Neighbor Guy’s glass is half full today.
Take your non-descript, run-of-the-mill, workaday American city. Confine your exploration to the surface, and you’re sure to be disappointed. In some cases, you’re bound to be profoundly depressed.
And yet, take another, closer look. Two blocks over, you stumble upon a city square that wouldn’t be out of place in a venerable European capitol. It isn’t the Place de la Bastille, but there’s considerably less traffic.
Across town, there’s a ramshackle roadhouse where the waitress calls you “Hon” and you can tuck into what might be the most perfect cheeseburger you’ve ever tasted. The burger isn’t made of Kobe beef. It isn’t stuffed with white truffles. It doesn’t cost half your paycheck, either.
No culture in this one horse town, you say?
Tell that to the Eastern European couple that’s been doing a brisk challah business out of their hole-in-the-wall bakery since you were but a gleam in your parents’ eyes.
Tell it to the jazz club owner whose modest uptown venue still packs them in despite the countless nabobs of negativity who insist that modern jazz and midsized cities simply don’t mix.
It isn’t Kiev, but there’s no jet lag. It isn’t the Village Vanguard, but there’s no lofty cover charge.
Put enough people in any given space, and there’s also bound to be the kind of positive energy required to ignite the fires of the imagination.
Somebody will get the bright idea to, say, start selling fruits and vegetables on the cobblestone street that encircles the State Capital. Others will catch on and begin to follow suit. Before you know it, organic potato varietals outnumber adjacent parking spaces.
Voila! A tradition is born.
Of course, a city doesn’t need a heaping helping of organic potatoes to have a sense of self worth.
The good news – and the moral, one supposes – is that it doesn’t need to be the center of the universe, either.
