![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ffloNow I know why it takes people so long to realize they're in that classic TV form of magic-realist magic. The woo-woo. The do-dee-do-dee, do-dee-do-dee.
It takes so long when it's customized to you.
Last weekend, cruising around to collect a few more library codes from yard signs before this summer's Summer Game deadline, I found myself in a curvy, cul-de-sac--filled development a little south & west of Carpenter and the highways. It was a neighborhood I'd never been in, or known of, of split-level houses of the era of my childhood home. Not a bad place to drive slowly and pull over to take pix of the signs I'd encounter.
It was a warm but not hot Sunday evening in late August, which is more like early fall for a lot of the US. I found myself slowing even more, a couple of times, for kids on bikes, and started to notice a greater percentage than one usually does of homes with people out front, or in the driveway/garage. Like we used to be at that house back in the Little Apple. Kids had balls and other toy-games. I saw a couple of scooters, and they didn't seem to be the powered ones.
Each new sector, around a curve or after a corner, had more kids in the streets, and adults and kids in yards. To photograph one sign, I had to be especially careful with the kids. We steered and veered around each other. Sometimes the children would gesture to me, or playfully block me, with eye contact. It didn't seem that any bouncing balls were going to escape and be followed by a retrieving youth I might hit, or just hit my vehicle their own ball selves. But there were a lot of them, altogether. When I came to one cul-de-sac that clearly had at least one yard sign, I decided to forego it, cuzza how many bike-run-scoot-etc. children were playing in its street.
After an inexplicably long time, it began to dawn on me that this street activity in what's more or less a suburb-y small-town-y residential neighborhood doesn't happen any more, to anywhere near that extent. That is, I never see it, and haven't seen it in maybe 30 or 40 years. Granted, some of that time I wasn't in places where I would, but I'm pretty sure it'd gone away, and others have spoken and written of it being a thing of the past. But here I was, and here it was. Not a screen in sight out there! Surely as many people outside as houses, all told, or close to it, though okay sure not someone outside from every home. But just remarkable. So much so I took a pic of the neighborhood sign as I left, to note what it was called, and maybe ask others about it.
My main pondering while experiencing this anomaly was what it might be about that particular neighborhood that made it so. Its physical layout & remoteness & sense of safety from that; its apparent mix of folks of many backgrounds, and with a lot of children of play-outside ages, or what used to be those; a nice evening, after supper for maybe most, and both the weekend and summer coming to an end soon; something about the subculture of that particular neighborhood, like robust block parties and other ways people might know their neighbors (a few of the library codes and responses hinted at such a thing, I'd find out later, entering them). And it did seep into my mind even while there that this was what it was like when I was a kid, with the default being playing outside, in the evenings, so much of the time.
But it didn't occur to me, until someone I told about this experience suggested it to me, that it was just like this:
And if I were the protagonist in an episode, it would've been tailored right to me, so that I wouldn't notice right away that the familiar ways of my childhood I was encountering were now obsolete. And---new twist---there never was a moment or place, there, during my time in that Twilight Zone, that I encountered the big tell, revealing how I must've slipped into the past, whether it was from physical objects or literal signs or something someone(s) said. It was only after I left, and later told someone about it, that I found I had very probably been in the Twilight Zone.
Do I dare drive back down there sometime to try to find it? I think not.
When next I look at my photos for the one with the "real" neighborhood name I altered amateurishly for the above image, will it even be in my phone? Or if it's there, will it have morphed into a photograph of some bushes, or a McDonald's arch, or a sign that says "No Outlet"? Seems quite likely.
Maybe I have a choice to go drive into it again, and, by doing so, disappear into it forever.
It takes so long when it's customized to you.
Last weekend, cruising around to collect a few more library codes from yard signs before this summer's Summer Game deadline, I found myself in a curvy, cul-de-sac--filled development a little south & west of Carpenter and the highways. It was a neighborhood I'd never been in, or known of, of split-level houses of the era of my childhood home. Not a bad place to drive slowly and pull over to take pix of the signs I'd encounter.
It was a warm but not hot Sunday evening in late August, which is more like early fall for a lot of the US. I found myself slowing even more, a couple of times, for kids on bikes, and started to notice a greater percentage than one usually does of homes with people out front, or in the driveway/garage. Like we used to be at that house back in the Little Apple. Kids had balls and other toy-games. I saw a couple of scooters, and they didn't seem to be the powered ones.
Each new sector, around a curve or after a corner, had more kids in the streets, and adults and kids in yards. To photograph one sign, I had to be especially careful with the kids. We steered and veered around each other. Sometimes the children would gesture to me, or playfully block me, with eye contact. It didn't seem that any bouncing balls were going to escape and be followed by a retrieving youth I might hit, or just hit my vehicle their own ball selves. But there were a lot of them, altogether. When I came to one cul-de-sac that clearly had at least one yard sign, I decided to forego it, cuzza how many bike-run-scoot-etc. children were playing in its street.
After an inexplicably long time, it began to dawn on me that this street activity in what's more or less a suburb-y small-town-y residential neighborhood doesn't happen any more, to anywhere near that extent. That is, I never see it, and haven't seen it in maybe 30 or 40 years. Granted, some of that time I wasn't in places where I would, but I'm pretty sure it'd gone away, and others have spoken and written of it being a thing of the past. But here I was, and here it was. Not a screen in sight out there! Surely as many people outside as houses, all told, or close to it, though okay sure not someone outside from every home. But just remarkable. So much so I took a pic of the neighborhood sign as I left, to note what it was called, and maybe ask others about it.
My main pondering while experiencing this anomaly was what it might be about that particular neighborhood that made it so. Its physical layout & remoteness & sense of safety from that; its apparent mix of folks of many backgrounds, and with a lot of children of play-outside ages, or what used to be those; a nice evening, after supper for maybe most, and both the weekend and summer coming to an end soon; something about the subculture of that particular neighborhood, like robust block parties and other ways people might know their neighbors (a few of the library codes and responses hinted at such a thing, I'd find out later, entering them). And it did seep into my mind even while there that this was what it was like when I was a kid, with the default being playing outside, in the evenings, so much of the time.
But it didn't occur to me, until someone I told about this experience suggested it to me, that it was just like this:
And if I were the protagonist in an episode, it would've been tailored right to me, so that I wouldn't notice right away that the familiar ways of my childhood I was encountering were now obsolete. And---new twist---there never was a moment or place, there, during my time in that Twilight Zone, that I encountered the big tell, revealing how I must've slipped into the past, whether it was from physical objects or literal signs or something someone(s) said. It was only after I left, and later told someone about it, that I found I had very probably been in the Twilight Zone.
Do I dare drive back down there sometime to try to find it? I think not.
When next I look at my photos for the one with the "real" neighborhood name I altered amateurishly for the above image, will it even be in my phone? Or if it's there, will it have morphed into a photograph of some bushes, or a McDonald's arch, or a sign that says "No Outlet"? Seems quite likely.
Maybe I have a choice to go drive into it again, and, by doing so, disappear into it forever.
