When someone asks where you live, the common reply is the city you reside in, or the state. What is hidden beneath all of the layers of civilization is where we actually live. We could dig deeply into our thoughts/psyche and even go so far as to say we live in the past, a dream, or wherever we can deal with reality the majority of the time. Or even further than that – what is reality? Your perception of it or mine? Or is there only one reality, if it isn’t witnessed, is it really reality…OMG, the possibilities are too much for me to handle. Back to the main objective.
Realizing that Project City Center and Echelon Place and some of those incredibly expensive, gigantic projects are going to be cities within cities and that they will house and provide income for a large part of a cities’ population – not to mention all of the $$$ that they will bring in – there are so many cities in a city of any size that one only has to step away from the mainstream to view/be a part of them.
One perfect example happened to me years ago when I flew to the University of Oregon Hospital for a week’s stay to see if I could be a kidney donor for one of my older brothers. While I read all of the paper work on what would happen to me and what my risk was and how people survived quite well with one kidney, etc., etc., etc., I started extensive testing to see if I could even donate a kidney. Twenty-four hour fluid intake/output, chest x-rays, pelvic/pap smear, and on and on. During this weeks time I also moved around in a small section of the hospital, visiting with my brother, other patients – young and old – nurses, doctors, wanna be doctors, medical students, watching dialysis in action, seeing patients that waited for donors, and so much more it was hard to even fathom. After one week, I was ready to be a donor, all I had to do was go back home (N. Idaho) and wait one month for a surgery date, come back about four days ahead of the surgery to make sure I didn’t have a cold or any illness, and BOOM, kidney out – kidney in, stay a week longer, go home and have a great life kind of thing.
After the week of testing, when I departed the hospital, I felt like I was leaving my family. It was a strange feeling and I was young enough to become enmeshed in the – Kee-rist I hate this word – ‘surreal’ time and feeling of the moment. This little world of people waiting for a donor to come along, living on dialysis machines, and hoping to survive until medical science developed other cures and a means for them to lead a normal life, was a city within a city. Nothing that happened on the outside had any bearing on what happened here. Leaving here made one feel as if they were stepping into another world. That’s exactly how I felt. This was my first experience with cities within cities.
As I’ve moved on through life and changed lanes a million times, I’ve experienced a lot of cities within cities. Poker is one of them. Obviously it’s a world where people meet, come back to, struggle to overcome their personal demons, battle to win the chips, and few ever come to grips with why they are there but just the same, it’s a city of its own that stretches across the world, connected by the Internet, airplanes and trains, automobiles and cruise ships.
Where is this going? Right here: Today I decided I’d take my daily walk out along Boulder Highway instead of laps around and through the RV’s in the park I live in. I’d been up a few hours, slapped on one of my favorite, lined, flannel shirts (with a few paint splotches on the lower front), pulled my long locks back into a bun type of thing held together with a scunzi (straggling salt and pepper tresses around my face trying to escape), bundle of keys in one hand and a bandana in the other (ear aches if there’s any wind at all), and away I went, out into a city in a city.
In order to understand and see this picture, you need to relax and close your eyes for a moment (even though the sun is out and it’s a brilliantly beautiful afternoon). Three lanes of traffic screaming by in each direction, whizzing past Sam’s Town Casino and Hotel just down the road from me, several Extended Stay Hotels on my side of the street – with a Walgreens Drug in between -with eateries of all types on the other, and an almost triangle where Flamingo, Boulder, and Nellis all intersect each other. Add one of those strange little cities of a ghetto looking Mexican tire/windshield/stereo looking lean-to that is open 24 hours a day, check cashing 24 hour building in there somewhere, and humanity. Tons upon tons of humanity walking/screaming by in vehicles, bus stops and city transit vehicles pulling in and belching out diesel smell and smoke, and in the middle of it all, IT’S SCHOOL BUS TIME. It’s amazing how many of these kids get off of these buses (more than one) at these extended stay places.
I hit the highway, moving along at a rapid clip, determined to get my heart rate up and get my exercise session in and make it a productive one too. Cars, trucks, buses, and life was screaming by. School buses pulled up and stopped, all of the traffic – going both ways – stopped too. Vehicles were backed up through several lights waiting for the kids to disembark and the buses to move on. A really cute little boy ran by me, his parents, about 20 feet behind him, cautioned him to wait for them. I stepped out of the boy’s way and when I reached the parents, I said, “He’s fast.” They agreed, and I added, “And cute too.” It’s just what you do…it’s a people to people/kid thang. They thanked me as they passed and I hoofed on.
A cutie little girl was up ahead with her mom and she smiled at me, I smiled back and said, “HI!” Her mom grabbed her and pulled her back, out of the way to let me pass. YIKES! That’s when a bell went off in my head. I was in a city in a city. I was on a highway that has more cop cars patroling at any time of day than the rest of the city put together for the most part. I’ve seen ‘working girls’ sitting at bus stops late at night, guys that I wasn’t sure I wanted behind me when I passed them, cars slowly troll by and the guy driving asking me where I’m going when I’m out walking late at night on this stretch of city within a city, and a whole world that I watch and want to stay out of.
I finished my walk in a ‘out and back’ on Boulder Highway, knowing that if I said hello to someone, they thought I was a street person and my next statement would be asking them for money…hey I get it everywhere I go, “Excuse me, Miss, you wouldn’t have an extra dollar…?” At least this bum/hustler has the class to call me ‘miss’.
I like to say hello to people as I pass them. I know that in doing so, I also open myself up for the bum that queries me for $$. But that is life when you live in a city within a city.