The land we belong to

Oct. 19 – Oklahoma City, OK

I was eating lunch at Madison's Pancake House and eavesdropping on two women having a lunch meeting. I was trying to guess from their conversation what line of work they were in. All I could gather was that they deal with vendors and contractors, that they spend advertising dollars, and that they needed to set deadlines for the selection of committees. Not once did they mention anything that might betray the nature of their profession. It made me wonder if they themselves had any idea what their job is. That doesn't surprise me, since the neighborhood I'm staying in reflects much the same character.

Oklahoma City, by area, is enormous, more than half the size of Rhode Island. The lack of local governments below the county level (townships, villages etc.) in Western states means that cities can annex land freely, in a way that's impossible on the East Coast. So once you cross the city limits of Oklahoma City, you've got ten minutes of farmland to traverse before you start to see suburbs, and another ten minutes before you get to the urbanized area.


Once you enter the inner ring of neighborhoods, you get the impression that you're seeing the city only from its back side. The buildings don't make much effort to put their best face forward, and the blocks alternate pretty quickly between the residential and the used-bus-scrapyard zoning types. To be sure, this part of town has more than its share of specialized businesses, such as lawnmower repair shops, picture framing concerns and vacuum cleaner emporia. And bars that look like outbuildings to which the primary edifice has long since been torn down.

Downtown proper is a healthy cluster of bank headquarters and government buildings, fitting for a Midwestern city of half a million people and a state capital. During the day there are convenience stores and lunch counters, and after six o'clock the streets are much emptier. But there's Bricktown, the requisite warehouse-turned- entertainment district on the upswing, with an unexplained canal flowing through it. (I can think of another city with a very well-explained canal flowing through it that hasn't done a damn thing about it.) And there's the WPA-era Civic Center Music Hall, with over 11,000 season ticket holders coming to see Broadway shows on Wednesday evenings. So it's a pretty average city with the added bonus of something actually going on here and about.

Then there's our neighborhood, which is located stalwartly in the suburbs, despite being inside the city limits. (If your street address is 2945 Northwest Expressway, face it, you're not part of a community. You're C-17 on the shopping mall directory of America.) It may technically be Oklahoma City, but it's also Amarillo. It's Albuquerque. To those of you reading this, it's Greece, it's Middlesex Township, it's northern Virginia. It's vendors, contractors and advertising committees. Instead of two people who have no idea what their business is, it's business that hasn't a clue who the people are.

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