Too Many Mornings

When my family first moved from downtown Denver to the suburbs nearly 12 years ago, I was excited because it was quiet, the new house required less maintenance, and my kids could ride their bikes up and down the street out front without worrying about traffic.

But I soon discovered I’m a city boy at heart, and started missing everything about the old place—the hustle and bustle of our remarkably diverse neighborhood, the ice cream shop with the Parisian café chairs, the creaky wooden floors of the crowded hardware store, and even our slightly dilapidated house, a three-story, 5,000-square-foot classic Denver Square that was built in 1899 but still had sturdy character despite undergoing many sloppy renovations during its long life.

Nothing in the suburbs interests me as much as it did in the city, not the people, the parks, or the businesses. But it’s city architecture that I miss the most.

City architects seem to work harder to make every home and neighborhood unique. Everything from roof lines and brick colors to porch and window styles is widely varied, often in the same block, and certainly from block to block. Although there are similarities between homes, each one tends to have several distinct and prominent features that separate it from its neighbors. It’s true even for apartment buildings. Within a few blocks of my old house, for example, there was a famous historic area named Poets Row, a long string of six very large apartment buildings, each with a singular design, each named for a different writer.

Most suburban homes, on the other hand, look about the same—bland, dun-colored variations of the wonderfully affordable ranch-style architecture first built in 1932 by architect Cliff May in San Diego, Calif., and popularized in the 1940s by Levitt and Sons, who used it in their famous planned community called Levittown, in Pennsylvania.  Former company president William Levitt, who died in 1994, is widely credited as the father of modern American suburbia.

There are interesting architectural sights to see in the suburbs, of course, but I’ve struggled to find ways to capture them in photographs.

For me, suburban homes and buildings tend to be more interesting at night. That’s when the tiresome sameness of the architecture is cloaked in darkness, lights create interesting shadows and shapes, and the distances between points of light naturally draw your attention to the openness and space that tends to pull people out of the crowded city to the suburbs in the first place. Colors often seem to be more vivid at night in the suburbs, too, although I’m not sure why.

I think these photographs I took illustrate what I mean. They’re abstract, and I believe the abstraction combats the stifling similarity that plagues suburban life at the same it captures what’s best about living here.

Bottles in a Garden Window/MikeWJ

House on a Hill/MikeWJ

Ranch-Style Home at Night/MikeWJ

Nothing beats a well-organized kitchen. Until you find food on the ceiling and you realize you can't explain how it got there. That's when the troubling questions start.

I wasn’t going to write a post today—or maybe ever again—but then I looked up.

Up at the ceiling in my kitchen.

There’s food on my ceiling. How, I wonder, did food get on my ceiling?

I don’t throw food on the ceiling. My wife and kids swear they don’t throw food on the ceiling. I rarely have guests in my house, but they don’t throw food on the ceiling, either, because if they did, I’d throw them out.

Food doesn’t throw itself on the ceiling, does it? No, I’m sure it doesn’t.

So just how did it get there?

And when?

And just what is it, anyway?

I won’t taste it—I’m not crazy—but it looks and feels like dehydrated grape jelly. We don’t have any grape jelly in the fridge. I don’t remember having grape jelly anytime in the last six months. And even if we did, how did it get on the ceiling, and why did I only just now notice it?

Am I that unaware?

And if I can miss something as obvious as jelly on the ceiling, then what else might I have overlooked?

Could it be something small, and insignificant? Or could it be something small, yet very significant? Something like the meaning of my life? Or whether I have a purpose? And, damn it all, why is there something that looks like dessicated grape jelly stuck to my kitchen ceiling near the recessed lights? And how did it get there? How?

I’ll clean it off, of course. I’ll take a damp sponge—one of these sponges that’s yellow and soft on one side and green and scratchy on the other side—and wipe it away. I could leave it there as a subtle reminder that life doesn’t always make sense, but I have a fairly nice kitchen, and I don’t believe fairly nice kitchens ought to have food on their ceilings. It’s a strong belief I have—although one that I wasn’t even aware of until I found food on the ceiling.

How is that you can believe something and not even know that you believe it?

And why did I decide to let you know about the food that’s stuck on my ceiling? I wasn’t going to post anything—not today, maybe not ever again.

What changed?

Why?

And why—WHY?—would you read it? Don’t you have something better to do? Don’t you have your own kitchen ceiling to attend to? Or are you actually reading? Have I simply imagined this whole thing—a blog, readers, comments—to alleviate the routine boredom of dealing with improbable and imponderable trivialities like cleaning food off the kitchen ceiling?

Now I’m looking up. Looking for…for…what?

Never mind.

I don’t know where the ceiling is on the Internet.

The Internet’s not anything like my kitchen. It’s not well lit, or well organized, or the least bit familiar to me. I pretend that it is, but it isn’t. Where’s the utensil drawer? Where are the drinking glasses, the plates, that old box of birthday candles, the flashlight, and the lighter for the grill?

Where should I be looking to make sure something’s not stuck where it shouldn’t be? Where?

Air Vent at Chipotle/MikeWJ

Staircase in Parking Garage/MikeWJ

Yellow Electrical Panel/MikeWJ

Church in Taos

Church in Boulder

Church in Golden

I’d like to thank two of my favorite bloggers, NoNameDufus and The Screaming Me Me!!, for giving me a couple of captioning awards this week. Despite my best efforts to be funny and brief, I don’t recall ever winning a caption contest before, so to win two of them in the same week sorta blew me away.

NoName’s award has a friendly Canadian-sounding name, the “I Be Hangin’ With nonamedufus.” Me Me’s award is even more convivial. It’s ”The Golden Phallus,” which is what I think they either ought to call the Oscar statuettes or the next James Bond movie.

And speaking of the Oscars, now that have my own awards to fondle laciviously late at night when my fragile ego needs a boost, I won’t feel so jealous when Brad Pitt, George Clooney or Matt Damon pick up an Oscar or two on Sunday. Suck on that, pretty-boy Clooney!

Thank you kindly for making my weekend much, much brighter, NoName and Me Me!