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altivoWent to the dentist this morning. Normal checkup and cleaning, but she had also wanted to replace an old (1979) filling in my front teeth. Long appointment, and boy have the procedures for what used to be called a "porcelain" filling grown complicated. I have to say, it's totally invisible. But even the older one wasn't very obvious except under black light.
Getting there was awful. Every time I go, the traffic seems to get worse. The construction in summer is always bad too, but when the detours have construction and additional detours on them you know things are out of control. Then came the freight train crossing... I was late but fortunately not so late that they couldn't still fit me in.
What really got to me this time was the obvious loss of green open spaces. It used to be that a good half of the trip was through farms and forest. That was just ten years ago. Now I hit vast wastelands of strip malls and six lane highways before a third of the trip is done. Places that I remember as beautiful forest and meadow with ponds and small rivers are all subdivisions now, packed with oversized houses on tiny lots, all house and no land. Typically all the houses look alike, or at most, half are mirror images of the other half. All are painted the same color, with the same color roof. Forty years ago Malvina Reynolds sang about the "Little Boxes, On the Hillside, Little Boxes made of Ticky Tacky..."
Bless you, Malvina, things haven't changed. Why anyone would want to live in a place where all the houses look alike and if the numbers fell off the doors you couldn't tell which one was yours, well, I simply can't understand.
Getting there was awful. Every time I go, the traffic seems to get worse. The construction in summer is always bad too, but when the detours have construction and additional detours on them you know things are out of control. Then came the freight train crossing... I was late but fortunately not so late that they couldn't still fit me in.
What really got to me this time was the obvious loss of green open spaces. It used to be that a good half of the trip was through farms and forest. That was just ten years ago. Now I hit vast wastelands of strip malls and six lane highways before a third of the trip is done. Places that I remember as beautiful forest and meadow with ponds and small rivers are all subdivisions now, packed with oversized houses on tiny lots, all house and no land. Typically all the houses look alike, or at most, half are mirror images of the other half. All are painted the same color, with the same color roof. Forty years ago Malvina Reynolds sang about the "Little Boxes, On the Hillside, Little Boxes made of Ticky Tacky..."
Bless you, Malvina, things haven't changed. Why anyone would want to live in a place where all the houses look alike and if the numbers fell off the doors you couldn't tell which one was yours, well, I simply can't understand.
