Today is my last day in Winston Salem North Carolina. Actually, it's my last day on the East Coast all together. My flight leaves the Raleigh-Durham Airport at 6:35 p.m. If everything goes well, I will be back in Seattle by 10:45 p.m. The first one is East Coast time, the second West Coast.
My impressions of NC are complicated. Some of it I don't get--like why everyone down here is so proud of the Confederacy. Why? Two things; first they wanted to keep slavery, and second, they lost. What's to be proud about there? I guess it's a southern thing.
I thought parts of NC were very beautiful--Transylvania County, land of the waterfalls, was strange and oddly ethereal. But the cities are sort of wussy. They aren't "cities" as I think of them, so much as bigger towns.
The coast was amazing.I would've loved to see more of it.
Then we hit Washington DC for a couple days and I'm still not sure what to think about that. My sister, father, and I all talked about our impressions last night. My dad was like "I don't care who you are, after seeing that, you come away with a sense of patriotism." Carly and I shared a look and were like "That's not what we came away with at all."
For me it was mostly sorrow. America used to mean something great. Now it's... Well, not what it was. Being in DC really drove that point home. Seeing Lincoln, and The Capitol and the Washington Monument. All of it made me think "Being American used to mean something great." When and how did we lose that?
But all told, I'm ready to get home. I miss my dogs, my friends (never thought I'd say that one, no offense), and home in general. I just miss it. I'm ready to get back to rain, and wind, and sweaters, and eighty shades of gray.
I gotta go now, I'm tearing up.
Also, sorry for the typos and such. I'm too lazy for spell check.
2 comments:
Remind me to tell you about my first taste of NC, where I'd moved in 1980 to be with my girlfriend (who had been accepted to UNC-Greensboro). On my first day there was a shootout right in the middle of town between - get this! - the KKK and the American Nazi Party aligned against the Communist Workers Party (!), who'd been granted a parade permit. It was nuts. We lived close to the interstate exit and all these pickup trucks full of hillwilliams waving rebel flags and swastikas drove right through our neighborhood on their way to the big showdown. It was like a Selma deja vu for Your Humble Narrator.
Yeah, remind me to tell you about that - or don't (since I just did), aslt...
Anyway, hurry back! We kept yer room just the way you left it.
Aren't you going to miss "The Man, The Myth, The Legend?" -Carly
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