T + 1 Week
I'm still going through re-entry shock after having been home for a week, and I'm constantly being reminded how much easier it is to love my family from 1,200 miles away.
I took my little brothers to the "Life Center" downtown, it's a community center with a basketball court, excercise machines, a pool, and other such things. It was just a bunch of steel beams when I left, now it's open for business.
Over the past few days I've noticed several places around town that have changed a great deal since my childhood.
There's a church downtown that was supposed to have been turned into a community center years ago that now seems like nothing more than a pile of semi-organized stones with windows and doors.
The Ritz theater, where I used to go almost every Friday night for a movie on their single screen, has been closed for years and will probably never open again. Its sound, heating, cooling, seating, and ceiling are all in tatters, from what I understand, and it needs a miracle of God to reopen. Well, that, or half a million dollars in repair and renovation, which is just as likely.
Some new businesses have opened and a couple have closed their doors in buildings on Main Street that have seen ventures start and fail time and time again through decades past.
Places that once were homes have become empty lots, and a few empty lots have sprouted homes. Hum the opening song from "The Lion King" for full effect
My old schools still stand, and there is talk of making additions to them to better serve students. They added air conditioning to Council Grove High the year after I graduated, and it seems now that all these youngin's are getting through so much easier than I did. Those twerps.
Tonight, as I sat and watched my little brothers abuse the shiny, new equipment at the life center and looked around and took in the smell of "newness" that permeated the place, I thought about how they'll one day see this place much as I now see some places around my home town.
One day, they'll see that center weaken from use and neglect, and it will eventually join the rest of the city in its collective state of partial dilapidation coupled with eternal usefulness.
Such is the way of the Flint Hills.
If any of that makes any sense.
I took my little brothers to the "Life Center" downtown, it's a community center with a basketball court, excercise machines, a pool, and other such things. It was just a bunch of steel beams when I left, now it's open for business.
Over the past few days I've noticed several places around town that have changed a great deal since my childhood.
There's a church downtown that was supposed to have been turned into a community center years ago that now seems like nothing more than a pile of semi-organized stones with windows and doors.
The Ritz theater, where I used to go almost every Friday night for a movie on their single screen, has been closed for years and will probably never open again. Its sound, heating, cooling, seating, and ceiling are all in tatters, from what I understand, and it needs a miracle of God to reopen. Well, that, or half a million dollars in repair and renovation, which is just as likely.
Some new businesses have opened and a couple have closed their doors in buildings on Main Street that have seen ventures start and fail time and time again through decades past.
Places that once were homes have become empty lots, and a few empty lots have sprouted homes. Hum the opening song from "The Lion King" for full effect
My old schools still stand, and there is talk of making additions to them to better serve students. They added air conditioning to Council Grove High the year after I graduated, and it seems now that all these youngin's are getting through so much easier than I did. Those twerps.
Tonight, as I sat and watched my little brothers abuse the shiny, new equipment at the life center and looked around and took in the smell of "newness" that permeated the place, I thought about how they'll one day see this place much as I now see some places around my home town.
One day, they'll see that center weaken from use and neglect, and it will eventually join the rest of the city in its collective state of partial dilapidation coupled with eternal usefulness.
Such is the way of the Flint Hills.
If any of that makes any sense.
posted by Logan C. Adams at 4/24/2005 09:19:00 PM
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