Small World

I was thinking the other day how vast the world seemed when I was a child, and how small it seems now.

But that's not exactly right, though.

The world still seems impossibly large and unknowable to me, but the areas I ranged during my childhood now seem woefully small. The blocks shorter, the creeks narrower, the distances somehow... less.

Before I left Pittsburgh, I had the opportunity to walk some of the old paths I had tread in my youth -- and I had to laugh at how short what had seemed epic distances actually were. I wondered if I'd grown, or if the world had shrunk in some essential but hidden way -- in ways only I could see.

When I got to be a little older, and my parents trusted my elder siblings to drive us to and from church of a Sunday morning, we would occasionally skip that particular form of purgatory and take my family's car on a joy ride.

Inevitably, part of the ride would take us down Berry Street, which had a steep slope that was broken at one point by a level area that then dropped away again. Our joy ride wasn't complete until we'd hit that level at some impossibly reckless speed and gone airborne when the road dropped away again. I called this maneuver "The Streets of San Francisco," (after the airborne car in the opening credits of the old Karl Malden/Michael Douglas cop show).

Gavan and I lived, years later, in a house on Frontenac Street, a dead-end street off the lower end of Berry Street. I had many chances to drive that street and go all "Streets of San Francisco" and I never managed to get either of the cars I drove while I was there airborne. That had everything to do with me, and nothing to do with the cars. And that's how I know that the world has shrunk a little. Or I have.