Oklahoma City, Kinda Pretty

Warm, sunny, beautiful architecture, still blooming trees. Basically, a delight of a city, especially after Salina, Kansas. We're staying pretty close to Bricktown which is a very hip part of town located on the canal, with its ducks and water taxis and riverboats. There's lots of live music joints and homestyle Italian restaurants, even a Banjo Museum. Every hour on the hour a fountain at the center of Bricktown goes nuts with a waterworks display. I also passed a statue of Johnny Bench and busts of some other baseball greats in front of the Bricktown Stadium.

I was directed by my friends to a great cheesesteak joint called Texadelphia, which oh so progressively makes a mean veggie philly. And last night, a group of us went and saw Trans-Siberian Orchestra at the Ford Center, which is huge, and tragically makes Madison Square Garden look like a black box and made me a little queasy at first. The show was fun; there was an amazing light show, super cool Christmas music, all in all, a really unique way to spend the first night of Hannukah. The dancing by some of the female vocalists reminded us a little of our own choreography, just a very watered down version plus a lot more hair thrashing.

For the lower Midwest (as this region of the country apparently is known), there are an awful lot of hills. I discovered this on my run yesterday, which was a bit of a change from the flat plains to which I've become accustomed. I ran by the Memorial and stopped to look around for a few minutes. I was completely taken aback by how much it affected me. I barely remember the bombing, I was ten years old, and it was in a completely different part of the country from where I grew up. And yet, seeing the tribute the people of Oklahoma created to honor the victims was very poignant. Living in New York City, whose own terrorist site has gone ten years without any structure built in its memory, I felt such pride for these people. I walked around the wall of children's paint-colored handprints and read the messages they had written. On the lawn were silver and gold chairs laid out like tombstones, for the sun to shine down on. And taking up the most space was a vast body of water, not even an inch deep. You might have stepped in it if you weren't looking. But in this water you could see the reflection of the trees overhead and then experience whatever personal reflections ensued. What a beautiful, classy and significant memorial, exactly what I would wish for the void in my own city.