Well, I'm back from Cincinnati.
I rode the train in on Saturday morning, March 26. The sun was shining, and although I spend a lot of time com-plaining about Se-attle's yuppi-fication, I was damned happy to be home.
Cincinnati had a couple days of chilly winter sunshine, but mostly it was gray and cold, and one day it snowed heavily, almost 3 inches. The day of the dump hap-pened to be the first day of spring, killing my only planned golf outing and wounding my spirits.
The black and white thing, the racial animosity that was a defining characteristic of my upbringing, is still palpable back there. Despite the fact that Cincinnati is more than 30 percent African American, you seldom see folks hanging out together outside the University District and a couple of nightclub zones.
My daughter, who is half-black, noticed that kids exiting the totally integrated high school near my mom's were to a boy/girl hanging with their own.
"Not one mixed group," she said.
Also, Cincinnati is in the throes of a street battle for control of the sidewalk drug trade. In just the week I was back, a 12-year-old girl was shot in the head and a 4-year-old boy was caught in a ghetto crossfire and seriously wounded.
In November, during my previous visit, a man was shot while walking his toddler son home. He was holding the child when his life ended in a bloody hail of gunfire. It is, downtown, and in the ghettos, a very dangerous place after dark, despite the boosters' denials.
As of March 14 there had been 14 homicides in what the civic apologists laughingly call the Queen City of the Midwest. (A few years ago the aforementioned little girl and little boy would have added to those numbers, but emergency medicine has improved significantly.)
Since I lived in Cincinnati for most of my first 35 years of life, it took a while - about eight visits - to lose my desire to see the place, and walk around reliving my youth. If it wasn't for my elderly mother and my sister and her family, I would never go back there again.
If and when I stop visiting, I will miss Skyline Chili, as distinctive a fast food as you can eat, White Castle and Frisch's Big Boy. The fast food in Cincinnati is far superior to the local version (sorry, Dick's, and sorry, Ivar's).
But good fast food does not a lifetime make.
My youngest daughter took a walk in the downtown area without us one day.
Although Vanessa is much less in-your-face than her scribbler papa, she has strong opinions that she usually keeps mostly to herself; she was raised in reticent, hesitant Scandy World, after all.
"I would never tell Grandma," she said, "but I couldn't live there. It was snowing so hard, on the first day of spring. All the trees were bare, and they have that dirty little brown river [the Ohio] they act like is such a big deal. Seattle is much better."
All this from a girl who has been complaining about the wet wintry deluge we suffered through this year, muttering "San Diego" as often as I mutter "Pinhead."
And that's another thing. The Cincinnati Reds proudly announced the day before I left that George W. Bush will be throwing out the first ball to start the 2006 baseball season. Dick Cheney threw out the first ball there in 2004.
Need I say more about the lack of political sophistication and the blind-eye patriotism that was always a feature of my dear old hometown?
Of course, God is the great ironist, and He played a hole card against me. My mother, 87, and the widow of two good men after a combined 50-plus years of marriage, has an extra cemetery plot.
She gave it to me, right next to my recently departed Uncle John.
To say that a dark emotional cloud passed over me as she showed me my final resting place would be to understate how I felt.
It is one thing for other people to die. I empathize. I remember with pleasure and regret. I miss the depart-ed. But Good Lord, me, wonderful me, with an oak tree over my shoulder and the sound of traffic, of people going on with their lives while I "rest" forever ... it is incomprehensible.
Life is as weird as it wants to be, and we spend most of our lives denying the one incredible fact: we are all going somewhere else, or nowhere else, at the end of our road.
Speaking of which, my neighbor for the past four years, Ruth Ann Elmer, died recently.
Ann was a brave and kind soul, and I will miss her. Despite a long battle with myriad illnesses, she always had a smile and something interesting to say when we stumbled upon each other two or three times a week.
All in all, then, I am glad to be home.
By the time you read this I will have written two columns and a feature story, will have eaten great Thai food at Phuket twice and will have played golf at least once up at Interbay.
You can play golf in a soft rain, but it's quite a bit harder to play in 3 inches of snow with your hands frozen to your club grips.
The Midwest is a good place to be from, and the people, however backward, can't approach the stubborn, culturally enforced stupidity of a place like Texas (see March 15 column).
But I find the Northwest the most congenial place in the country to be. And for now at least, here we all are.
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