No Place Like Home

Sometimes the best part of the trip is coming back home. Today the whole family surprised me at the airport, all tucked tightly in the little Vibe to greet me at the pick-up gate. After we got home, we sat together in the living room and listened to each other's stories. I heard about the colossal snow and all the takeout food they ate; they listened to me tell about Atlanta. I brought home caramel taffy for the 12-yr-old and handcrafted earrings for the college student.

Here's a bit of what I told them:

I stayed at the Highland Inn (www.thehighlandinn.com) in the Virginia-Highlands neighborhood of Atlanta, which seems a little like Lincoln Park in Chicago and a little like Uptown in Minneapolis. The building, which was once a family apartment complex with sleeping porches and main hall for family bridge games in the twenties, and then became the famous Wynne Hotel and Tea Room in the forties, is now billed as a boutique hotel, and people who stay there seem to know the furniture is old and all the doors and windows stick a little bit. Pictures in the hall are autographed by the Indigo Girls and Jerry Jeff Walker, the All-American Rejects and Joan Baez. It rained a good twelve hours on one of the days and my roof spouted a leak. I put the ice bucket under it and another leak started. When I called down to the front desk the Southern gent at the office told me, "Yes, it's been raining quite a lot today. But it'll stop." So I walked down to housekeeping and got another ice bucket. I lined them both with washclothes to buffer the ping-ping of the raindrops.

The manager finally turned on the heat Friday night, after I had slept in socks and my Gortex jacket the previous nights, and the radiators hissed and banged and popped. Each room has an orange photocopy on the back of the door that reads, "What Is That Strange Noise? Built in 1927, the Highland Inn uses a steam radiator to heat. The pipes make a loud noise for a few minutes unitl it heats up." I met a man in the foyer and he said, "This place reminds me of a ship, with these long hallways and all these doors and pipes."

The hotel outsourced its guest transportation to Executive Services, and a mild-mannered black man named Kenneth met me at baggage claim. The "Where Atlanta" tourist magazine claims, in an article titled "Atlanta's own 7 wonders," that Hartsfield-Jackson International is the world's busiest airport. On the freeway, on the way to the inn, I asked Kenneth about the nearby Little Five Points neighborhood.

He said, "You like that hoochie-koochie-crazy stuff, huh?"

"What do you mean?" I laughed.

"You'll see. A lot of crazy people walking around there."

I looked over at him. "Is it safe?"

"Yes. It is. With crazy people, see, at least you know they're crazy. You know what you're dealing with. It's the others that worry me. See what I'm saying?"

"I know what you're saying," I tell him.

"I drive a limo. I pick up a man and a woman and they're all 'Oooo, I love you, kiss-kiss, smooch-smooch.' Then they start drinking and they're in and out of clubs all night and then they're all 'I hate you' and 'You're despicable' and slamming doors and carryin' on. That worries me. I don't know what they're going to do next."

Another African American driver, this one much older, picked me up at the Hilton taxi stand. He didn't talk much until I asked him what he thought the temperature was outside.

"You talking to me?" he turned his head to the side.

He said, "I dont know exactly. 60, maybe 60, in the sixties." He talked like he had a few sore teeth.

"Where you travelin' from?' he asked me.

When I told him Minnesota he said, "Oh, I couldn't live in a place that cold." He told me he had lived in Atlanta his whole life. Said he'd never been anywhere else, really. He had a brother living in New York for awhile but he never went up there to visit. I told him I hadn't been too many places either.

He said, "My kids they always telling me to get out and travel. I'm goin' to do that sometime. Take a whole year off and travel to all the places I've been wanting to go. My kids be like, 'Where are you? We can't find you. You're never home.' "

I asked him where he'd like to go first.

"Oh, I don't know," he said.

Traffic had started to pick up and he'd tap his horn at a pedestrian about to cross in front of him or a car wanting to pull into his lane. A snappy young man dressed in all black--black suit, black shirt, black tie--walked his white poodle along Freedom Parkway. I thought the dapper man cut a striking scene. But my driver said, "Look at that dog. Looks like he having a ball." You could tell he loved his home, the people in it, the people, even, passing through it.

I said, "Traffic's heavy now. I heard about that bus accident this morning." A motorcoach filled with a college baseball team from Ohio had crashed on nearby I-75, killing six and injuring many others.

"Yeah," the man said, "I'm still getting over that one. That one hit me hard. I'm still getting over that one."


p.s. Those margaritas I touted earlier were mislabeled. I'm not a big margarita fan anyway. They were martinis, freshly squeezed grapefruit martinis and yum, they WERE Atlanta's best.