ATLANTA—I don’t do big cities, but I don’t mind Atlanta.
If you were to force me to pick my favorite American city, I wouldn’t pick one because I don’t like being forced to do anything.
My mother used to force me to eat tapioca pudding as a kid, the texture reminded me of old-person snot and I refused to eat it because I couldn’t understand how the same advanced civilization that invented bacon, airplanes, and the Thigh Master, came up with tapioca.
But like I was saying, if you asked me nicely to pick a favorite major American city, maybe I would pick Atlanta. Because I have history here.
Right now I am driving I-285, through Atlanta’s congested traffic. The long line of vehicles moves five feet per hour. It’s miserable.
I have plenty of time to remember all kinds of things in this gridlock. Things like, for instance, tapioca.
And I can recall an era before smartphones, when newspapers were works of journalism, before they
got swallowed by internet agencies who produce articles entitled: “TWENTY-ONE REASONS WHY BOTTLED WATER WILL KILL YOU.”
And I remember when the Atlanta Journal Constitution was the highlight of my day.
We lived in Atlanta for a hot minute when I was a boy, and each morning I would be the first to retrieve the newspaper. My uncle thought this was hysterical.
“You’re fetching the paper?” he said. “That’s a pretty good trick, Fido. How about next I teach you to shake, roll over, and tee-tee on command?”
But I already knew how to do those things.
So I would open the paper to read my favorite columnist. Then, I would cut out the column with scissors because it was the brightest spot of my day.
Later, when my uncle would shake open his newspaper, he would find a gaping hole where…