Daddy, make a picture

In the place we live in, you could live a mile from someone but still have to drive miles just to get to them. Roads twist and turn around lakes and long-forgotten paths, over hills and connect in random ways you only know if you’ve already been lost.

Where we are now, in Southern Florida, everything is at right angles. Roads go straight for miles past schools and strip malls. Towns are divided not by rivers or hills but by being north or south of the side street off of the highway.

My Grandparents came here in 1971. You could still see Seminole Indian alligator wrestlers and coconut patty stands dotted US1.

Now it’s a forest of identical strip malls with identical stores and restaurants separating identical walled and gated communities and identical shopping malls. Everything here is a sort of GUI, designed to give you an experience without all of the messy inconvenience of actually going to a New York deli or a Bahamanian fish market.

I can’t imagine why anyone would want to live here, as opposed to there. Then again, it was 45 degrees in Stamford when I left. It’s seventy now and it’s past 11PM.