My son has spent most of his life in the suburbs, the only exception being when he was nine and the two of us lived with friends in a row house in Oregon Hill, one of the older neighborhoods in Richmond, and not necessarily one of the safest (though it's been getting better). That year was his only experience living in the city - a year during which we were dirt poor and I was in the midst of my own depressive episode - and it is the only experience on which he has to base his opinions of city life. So for the past several years, whenever we discussed his inevitable move back to Richmond, and even last year, when the two of us lived in a house in the Virginia countryside, I heard nothing but complaints about how horrible it was going to be living in the city.
In response, I've taken it upon myself to teach him the joys of the urban lifestyle. He has, for instance, completely warmed up to the convenience of being able to call for food to be delivered to our door. Not just pizza or sweet and sour chicken, no, he can order burgers and spaghetti and black and bleu salads. Okay, not so much the salad, but he's excited about the options, nonetheless. He's even developed a platonic crush on the dirty, tattooed, Fu-Manchu sporting Birkenstock boy who delivers his favorite burgers. And he's starting to warm up to his new status as a city boy.
So yesterday I thought it was a good time for his initiation to another urban lifestyle institution - the laundromat. Now I know what you're thinking. Laundromats are everywhere, you say. What's so urban about a hot, stuffy, strip-mall occupying washeteria?
Well, I offer you this, in the kid's own words:
"I love the laundromat [ed. note: WTF?!]. You've got homeless guys sleeping on the plastic chairs inside. Snooty white people and hippies going to the health food place next door. Strange men asking to bum cigarettes. A crazy woman talking to her towels while she folds them. And some dude breaking up with his girlfriend on the payphone." And I think he would have added a bit about the college girls in their laundry day shorts too, but he never talks to his mother about such things.
Anyway, I think he's starting to warm up to the place.
Yup. That kid's gonna be a writer.
ReplyDeleteYes. I can picture him ten years from now, wearing his System of a Down t-shirt, e-mailing angry manifestos to the government from his one-room apartment over a bar downtown, the keys to his taxi cab beside him on the desk . . .
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