East

Sometimes I play like I'm a writer. On the plane I gave myself the exercise to describe what I saw out the window.

Looking out the window you see a thin, sharp line of flat clouds cut across the horizon. Your eyes follow the line west from its tip back to an explosion of soft bubbling cloud.

From the sky you can see two lakes situated on either side of a range of rolling hills. The lake further away is green like emeralds. The other looks as if a painter has mixed his favorite dark green emerald with basic white. The perfectly symmetrical rectangular and circular fields near the lakes look as if the same painter used his steady hand to layout the world--just as he always wanted it--by dipping a giant brush in his two pools of green.

From here a larger lake can be seen in the distance, it's the color of reflected light. Much smaller pools dot the landscape between the plane and the large lake. They all reflect the same light, they look like a broken bottle scattered across dark asphalt.

Perhaps the Indians and the Pagans had some way to separate their minds from their bodies. Perhaps they did so and floated high above the ground, looked down upon the the hills, mountains and rivers spread across the earth like wrinkles on their sacred mothers' faces. Perhaps this is why she is affectionately known as Mother Earth.

Rivers don't move when viewed from a great distance.

Even though the cities and their twisting streets aren't perfectly symmetrical there is no doubt of their origins. They are not naturally formed but have the soft flowing edges of an Aztec Jaguar carving.

The fields that follow the river are greener than the rest. If looked at from a child's perspective maybe it appears as if those greener fields have sucked the color out of the rest.

That's all. Here's a little about the trip itself.

Flying into Chicago I get nostalgic for Indianapolis. It's definitely the trees but there is something else too, something I can't put my finger on. Maybe it's the spacing of the buildings or the layouts of the roads or maybe it's just that I know we're in the mid-west. I know the houses look different, in and around San Francisco there are a lot of town homes and apartments, many of the houses look no more than ten years old. The houses themselves tend to be wide but not very deep. In the mid-west the yards are bigger, the houses are deep instead of wide and look ancient with their brick walls.

Even in New York I feel a little nostalgia for Indianapolis. The two cities obviously have very little in common but when you see a colorful oak you feel worlds closer to Indy than you ever do in San Francisco.

New York shows its age. Its fire-trucks come straight out of the 80s, its subway looks to be from the 60s or 70s. But they work, and the city is huge. I can imagine it's much tougher to keep all of its public works up-to-date. Suddenly BART and Muni seem clean to me, hopefully one day Muni will be as reliable as the New York subway (I'm told it's really reliable).

We walked from Washington Square (4th St) up 5th ave and Broadway to Time Square. We didn't have enough time to really plan an itinerary so we just walked. This was a nice approach because we could stop and look at buildings, stores, cafes, whatever, without feeling like we needed to rush to get somewhere. After Time Square we walked up to about 55th St and then back down to the Rockefeller Center so Robyn could see the Ice Skating Ring.

We soaked in the people, the crisp air, the brick churches that were probably once the tallest buildings in the City. Strange to think that now the tallest buildings are that tall for functional reasons while the old giants of the City were that way more for aesthetics.

It's a noisy city. The drivers are quick to honk, there is almost always an emergency vehicle going somewhere--trying to be in a hurry but mostly just getting stuck in traffic with everyone else.

That night we met up with a group of friends for dinner. Some I was meeting in person for the first time and was pleasantly surprised by their greatness. If you're wondering how I have friends who I haven't met in person it's because they are Internet friends, you should try some, they can be great.

The next day we drove down to Delaware for a wedding. I'm sure Robyn will have some nice pictures from that posted on her blog soon.

I don't think I've ever been to Delaware prior, and we didn't really do much there besides visit Wilmington, which you might have heard of (look at where your credit card bills come from). They have the best old red brick colonial style houses. I almost wanted to move there just to live in one of those homes. But the city itself felt like a small town disguised as a big city. There was a downtown with a few buildings that were probably 20+ stories, but the city's streets were bare. We went to breakfast one morning at a diner downtown and it was full of flannel and men looking at us as if they knew we weren't from around there. The menu had the "scraple" littered through out it. At first we thought it was a spelling error (scramble) but asked the waitress about it and she explained it is a grayish meat made from the leftover pig parts. She offered a free sample but we quickly explained we were vegetarians, she sort of rolled her eyes and moved on. The nice part was that we fed four of us for under $13, stuff is cheap there.

The wedding itself was pleasant and stress free for the most part. Like I said, check Robyn's blog for pictures in the future.

The most adventurous part was the Sheraton Hotel. It was nasty. There were (what we labeled) "glazed donut" stains on the ottoman, the doorknob for the partition between the bedroom and the main room fell off if you tried to close or open the door, and our friend Dustin found a crushed, hairy Junior Mint on the floor. I always thought Sheraton's were nice, not sure what was up with this one. Oh well. Oh well.