Dark Bilious Vapors

Rachel is soliciting her readership for contributions to "an excellent list of positive things about" Memphis, relative to a discussion she had with a friend of hers who was apparently running this here place down. If you're a Memphian who loves the city, go contribute to the list.

As for myself.... well, any regular reader of this space knows that I'm still a St. Louisan at heart; about the best thing I can say about Memphis is that, as another old Mississippi River town it has very much the same feel as St. Louis, save that it's on the "wrong" side of the river. It took moving down to Memphis to realize that I had apparently internalized "east" as "towards the Mississippi" and "west" as "away from the Mississippi". While I'm getting better, I still mess up my directions as a result.

No fair drawing adverse inferences and concluding from this seemingly lukewarm endorsement that I hate Memphis; I don't. Midtown feels "just right" for me (of course, that was after a number of years, both in the St. Louis area and in the Memphis area, that I'd been living in suburbia, and I was desperate to get urban again; now that I'm in Midtown everything feels right), and I like my job (most of the time). But as I've said before, I don't think that a native St. Louisan truly feels happy anywhere else, though Memphis feels the most "St. Louis-like" of any place I've ever lived. I wonder if that feeling holds true for any river town. I'm not entirely sure I want to spend any time moving to, say, Dubuque or the Quad Cities, Vicksburg, Minneapolis-St. Paul or any other river cities just to find out, though...

Len on 09.30.04 @ 09:08 AM CST