Home for the Holidays

My mother likes to take Academy Blvd from the very north end of Colorado Springs to the very south end of Colorado Springs because she says it is "more direct" - dealing with bumper to bumper traffic and endless red traffic lights rather than taking the interstate which could quickly and easily get us home. A 20 minute trip becomes 40 minutes and she knows I prefer the speed and efficiency of the interstate, and to appease me rubs my hand and gives me a lame anecdote about how often she hits green traffic lights as she turns onto Academy Blvd anyway. With each red light we hit, I sigh a deep and irritated sigh.

That's what being home for the holidays is all about - being somewhere that I dislike - in this case, Colorado Springs - with people that I don't understand. I like my family. It's just that for the most part we might as well be complete strangers. They are people whom I have a high degree of familiarity with, and that I wish I could know better, but because of distance, history, politics, whatever - I just don't know very well and probably never will.

My mother lives in a part of town that is an asphalt jungle in the most negative way. Box stores, strip malls, cookie cutter houses and mile and mile of road. No sidewalks in sight. No pedestrians. No cute independent store fronts. I often wish my mother lived in a different neighborhood. The part of town west of Union Blvd - another major street - would be ideal. Downtown Colorado Springs, Old Colorado City and Manitou Springs are the last bastions of liberalism in a town that has been taken over by large corporations and Christian organizations.

Yet to live on the "west side" would be something my mother would never consider doing and so when we return to Colorado Springs, it's back into the car, back into the malls and feeling depressed that my family and I live in two very different worlds, and that they have no interest whatsoever in knowing anything about mine.