This morning at 8:00 Sandra and I were at UVRMC (the local “big” hospital) for her MRI. I decided that rather than sit for an hour in a sterile waiting room playing with my new Blackberry device, I’d go get some breakfast. So I went to McDonald’s, and that took all of 10 minutes.
So I drove around.
UVRMC is at the northwestern corner of what I call “central Provo.” That’s where the grid of streets gets interrupted by the Grandview hill, and in the heart of that grid are a few places that were pretty important to me a decade ago.
I drove past the Acadamy Square library, built in the gutted-then-renovated facade of the old Brigham Young Acadamy. From there I drove past the little house on the 400 block of 2nd east where Sandra and I had our first married apartment, living downstairs from my friend the genius after whom I named “Kevyn” a decade later.
I drove a couple of blocks over to 341n 300e, which was my last “single” apartment — a house I shared with four other guys and a married couple who got the basement. I drove past the first LDS church Sandra and I attended as a married couple. I looked at the contstruction-atop-a-smoking-hole where the ratty old piano store used to be, where I worked for about 4 months.
I circled BYU campus, where I graduated about 11 years ago with my Bachelor’s Degree in music composition. On my way back towards the hospital I drove past 876N 300W, where RMS Audio and HoTay productions joined forces in 1995 to create Sanctus Records (which I sold off six years later). And finally, I drove past the house where Chalain was living when I first met him.
“Central Provo” used to seem much bigger.
–Howard
When people say, “You can never go home,” they are wrong.
It’s just that home never stays the way you remember it.
I’ve always admired the Salt Lake City area for the way they adhered so well to their coordinate-based street system. Pretty much every city I’ve seen that tries it doesn’t manage to extend it very far or well before the whole thing breaks down, with strangely named streets and running in new directions and such. Seattle has a lot of problems in that respect.
I wonder what returning to Ann Arbor in ten years will be like.
Incidentally – music composition? I’d always guessed your degree would be in CS or business or even marketing or something. Is there an interesting story behind how you ended up where you are with a music degree?
Boston would make your head explode.
I’ve been to Boston
I’ve been to Boston. As near as I can tell, the moment the new maps come out, the road crews look at their annual budget and determine how WRONG they can make the maps with the money they have on hand.
–Howard
Re: I’ve been to Boston
The way we see it, if you can’t figure out where you’re going by dead reckoning and directions based on where things used to be 20 years ago, you don’t deserve to get there. We like to call it “Yankee ingenuity.”
Re: I’ve been to Boston
Pardon me thread jumping (and generally jumping, I mean no offense), but is that sign, and your nick, what I think it is?
Cthulhu fthagn!
It is indeed.