The Arcade in Memphis, Tennessee

If you walk out of my building, take a right and walk about a block, you'll find a trolley stop.  Have a dollar bill ready and get on. Unless it's lunch on a weekday... then... FREE!

The Riverfront trolley takes you up Main Street, past the Civil Rights Museum and the Hotel Lorraine, where Dr. King was assassinated.  Then, it stops at the corner of G.E. Patterson and Main.

Get off the trolley and cross the street and you'll be standing in front of the Arcade Restaurant.

It's not a place where you play video games, but rather the name refers to an architectural style that incorporates arches and columns.  The arcade is the oldest restaurant in Memphis and was founded by a Greek immigrant family in 1924 and is run by that same family today.

That's my favorite part of the story of this National Historic Landmark.  It was made by immigrants and it's an integral part of Memphis history.  It's one proof of thousands, I believe, of how so many  individuals have contributed to what we now take for granted as natural outcomes of being "plain, old" Americans.  None of us are plain, old Americans, are we?  Like the Arcade restaurant, we have a little story that somehow connects us all to some other place besides the one we now call home.

While you're sitting in that restaurant munching on sweet potato pancakes and feeling like you're a part of living history, it might blow your mind when someone tells you that Elvis used to chill out here all the time.

Maybe even in the booth you're sitting in.

What a trip.

This is Memphis, baby.

Yeah.

Sweet potato pancakes. I have one word for you: share. I never met a plate I couldn't inhale, but I could NOT finish these. Very rich. But delicious.

Also delicious, but not on the menu.

Tell me about the places in your town that have stories linked to the past.  Do you visit them often?

Photos taken and edited on my Motorola DROID X.

Lyrical Life: Home

I mentioned that it gets dark fairly early here, but I didn't mention how much the cold is getting to me.

I don't like the cold. I have a theory that I'm not anthropologically suited to it having most likely descended from nomadic desert peoples.  Or I'm just a huge baby. This past Wednesday, when I left our building, I exclaimed, "It's beautiful out here!" and then found out it was fifty degrees. I'm officially losing my Florida blood and becoming a Midsouth person.

I know it sounds strange, but that moment felt significant to me.

Y. and I headed over to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art that morning after depositing N. at the venue for her holiday show rehearsal.  My two year old son and I quietly walked through the museum, and had interesting conversations about shields and bad guys and flowers.  Then, I came across a tiny exhibit called "Pines to Palmettos: Florida Landscapes of Walter R. Locke."

I walked past the understated etchings of places near or similar to the place where I had grown up, and I suddenly missed that the trees were probably still green there.

And I missed the sandy soil that we tried to grow things in.

And I remembered the way you could get away with wearing flip flops until the first week of December.

And, man, I missed my mom.

And, then inevitably I thought of all of the places I had taken for granted because they were always going to be there.

There's a clock tower in Daytona proper that has been there ever since I can remember.  When I was a girl, I would play around its steps with my brother while my parents walked up and down the boardwalk or sat on a bench and watched us.  When I was a teenager, it was where we would sit for a few minutes to figure out what we were going to do that evening after spending the day at the beach. When I was in my 20s, it was a place I would sometimes visit just to clear my head.

And then I just sort of forgot about it.

Until now.

Florida still feels like my home. In the midst of a "beautiful" 50 degree morning, home momentarily slipped away from me.  It's ridiculous, but I feel disloyal.

We're all here together, and that's enough to make me happy... but I still feel like we're not home.

Home still feels there. I wonder if it always will.

Daytona Beach, Florida -- Clock Tower at the Boardwalk

You know how the time flies
Only yesterday was the time of our lives
We were born and raised in a summer haze
Bound by the surprise of our glory days...

Nothing compares, no worries or cares
Regrets and mistakes, they're memories made
Who would have known how bittersweet this would taste?

- Adele, Someone Like You

Home Sweet High Rise

We're here.

I'm going to do a run-down in the form of a bullet post because, hi, I just moved away from my home state that I lived in my entire life and I do not need the pressure of writing a whole post, so why don't you back off already...

Um.  So, that was me talking to myself.  Okay... bullets...

• Road trip. We split the drive to Memphis up over two days this past weekend.  It would've been 13 hours straight, but someone in this family hates road trips.  That someone is also the only other licensed driver in the family.


• Tariq drove. The entire time.  I suggested this was because he's a control freak.  He explained that it was because he wanted me to relax and didn't want me to stress about having to drive, too.  He apparently does not have any problem with making me feel like the biggest jerk on the planet for saying that other thing.


• We stopped in Atlanta. Where some of THE coolest and most awesome people I know live.  I'm a huge jerk.  Again.  In my defense, we got in at 8p.m. and left at 11a.m.


• The kids were terrific. Seriously.

"My kids at hour seven of their second day of traveling."

• Weather.  Checking the weather before you leave is a good idea and something I will remember to do before the next road trip we take.  We drove through a tropical storm for about a third of our trip.  Good thing we're Floridians and we eat tropical storms for breakfast.


• Alabama, I love you, but your road signs are bipolar. One minute I'm horrified by the sign that is proclaiming homosexuality to be a sin, another moment I'm equally horrified by the sign that's boasting that their strippers were featured on "Jerry Springer," and I just shook my head at the one with an older black lady, a young white woman and an older white man proclaiming that they were Republicans.  These signs were all within ten minutes of each other.  I guess the section of Alabama we drove through is fine with straight Republican strippers of various races and ages.  Everyone else?  Move it along.


• We finally got to our place on Monday evening.  It.is.AWESOME!!!  Let me put it this way, we have a concierge. I totally belong in a building like this.  It's like my mother ship, really.

"This is my hood, yo."

• Oh, and there's a law school around the corner, too.

"Calm down, Dad. This is not going to happen."

• I kinda love it here already. It's only been two days, but I think downtown living suits me.  Every day is an adventure.  In fact, yesterday, Tariq drove to Arkansas just to get to the nearest Wal Mart. He returned from this trip every bit as horrified as you're imagining.  It seems that while he was in the electronics section, someone asked a salesperson what a "ringtone" was and how they could get one.

"The bridge to Wal Mart. In Arkansas. As seen from our building's roof."

• And, finally, I AM COMPLETELY UNPACKED. Yes.  In one day.  All my stuff.  Out of sixty (big) boxes.  I didn't realize this was a big deal until Britt told me she was impressed, like, four hundred times.

That's all I have for now.

Photos taken with my SONY DSLR-A230. Cough::SEE, Britt?::cough.

Where I've Been And Where I'm Going

Here’s a funny story.

Eighteen months ago, I looked at my surroundings and realized that we didn’t belong here.

I spoke with Tariq and he agreed.

It’s a strange thing to realize that you’re living what most people consider a dream come true, and to then simultaneously feel that it’s all just wrong.

Let’s backtrack.  Values should be questioned.  Not necessarily in a “down with the establishment” kind of way, but more of a “gee, I wonder if this is really right for me” kind of way.  That’s complicated sounding.  Here’s what I mean.

I didn’t know until eighteen months ago that the worth of a value as it is applied in your life is completely subjective.  I assumed that if it worked for my parents, that it should work for me.  Period.  The End.

After we got married, with help from both of our parents, we bought a huge house in a beautiful, gated community right outside of Orlando.  We lived in this house and we filled it with lots of beautiful things.  We invited people over, we had parties, we had children, we created a life that revolved around this house and this community and we enjoyed this life as much as we could.

Tariq and I have many things in common.  One those things is that we try to make the best and do our best in just about any situation.

That sometimes leads to us never really stopping to ask ourselves about what we really want... This applied to our life.  We never asked ourselves if living in this little golf community thirty miles from any sort of museum, playhouse, real library or homeless person was a life that fit in with our values.  We just assumed that since it was something our parents, and it seems everyone else we’ve ever known, valued, then it was something we valued.

I guess we were afraid that if we directly confronted the disconnect between our values and those of the people we love that there would be hurt and feelings of rejection from the people who were living them and trying to pass them on to us.

That was silly.

If you don’t like chocolate and I lovelovelove chocolate, does this translate to me not loving or respecting you?  To an outright rejection of you?

Of course not.  You don't like chocolate.  I do.  The.end.  Period.

It’s the same with big houses in gated communities filled with lots of beautiful objects most of which are a deep red and gold which, hey, you really like and thanks so much for your generousity, but would not be your first choice in terms of decorating.  Ahem.

It’s true of values, too.

Eighteen months ago, long story made short, we decided to sell all of our furniture and move to a condo in downtown Orlando.  The decision to downsize from 3200 sq. ft to 1700 sq. ft seemed (and still seems) crazy to a lot of people.  You have to understand, though, we are not stay at home people.

We like to be out.  Having a big house keeps you from being out.  Trust me on this one.  We also crave diversity.  Not just among people, but within experience, within sights, within everything.  We have short attention spans, what can I say?

Anyway.

We decided not to sell the house for various reasons, so the option was to rent it out.

We did the thing everyone should do when they’re trying to pawn off their responsibilities er, make their home look attractive to others.  We examined critically from a consumer’s eyes and realized there were some very specific things that needed to be done: blinds, new paint, new flooring, pressure washing... the list went on and on.

So did the financial total.

It was going to be expensive to move out of this house.  If I were more clever, I could pinpoint the exact location of the irony in the situation.

I felt discouraged because, frankly, we didn’t have the money to do all that stuff.

As March neared, we talked a lot about it.

What should we do?

Maybe we should just stay in the house?

It’s a great house.

We should just stay.

But then.

Even more weekends would be spent doing house stuff instead of living stuff, so we realized that no, this was still not for us, and we shouldn’t allow the inconvenience of living our true values stop us from moving forward.

We listed furniture for sale even though we didn’t know if we were going to be moving any time soon.

We called out painters, blinds installers, and flooring people to do estimates even though we didn’t have the money to pay them, yet.

We stopped buying stuff for our house, so we could minimize on the amount of stuff we’d have to move.

We threw out stuff we didn’t absolutely need or that would not fit in a place that was going to be half this size.

We dreamed, we held on, we didn’t know how it was going to happen, but, we knew it was going to happen.

We were going to get a small place in the heart of the city.  We were going to leave the suburbs because every day we spent here was like losing a day we could spend living the life we wanted for ourselves.

Then came July.

A job offer finally confirmed with a full moving package.

We could get all that stuff done to the house.  We could hire a realtor to help us rent the house.

We put the house up on a Thursday, it rented the following Wednesday.

It’s done.

We’ve got movers coming on the 18th.

It’s done.

We’re going to look at condos in downtown.  It’s finally happening.

But not quite like I envisioned.

Because, um, I’ve never even actually been to Memphis, Tennessee.