Wednesday, April 17, 2002
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Wednesday, April 17, 2002 |
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O Peachtree, the city I love By BILLY MURPHY
I love Peachtree City. I know many people take me wrong sometimes in my little "humor" columns because I like to make fun of all our little idiosyncrasies. Rather, it is really more like how I am in a family and you have to just call attention the fact that we are all rather silly sometimes. Believe me, I have been other places and Peachtree City is the best. Since 1978 I have lived in East Point, Macon, Lilburn, Lithonia, Clarkston and Decatur. I list these in no particular order as to further confound old credit card companies and college loan officials. Most of these locations were while I was single and living in cheap, basement apartments, or what I lovingly call "radon pits" (Should I be growing this sixth toe?). East Point was dull, Macon was depressing, Lilburn was congested and Lithonia was damp. Clarkston was just plain scary and Decatur, though cool, was old. It's just plain tough, grocery shopping to the smell of liniment. In Peachtree City we have special parking spaces for pregnant mothers. In Decatur they had special spaces for walkers, oxygen tanks, and an on-call ambulance. The Kroger had a double aisle for "Depends." The city was a perpetual spider web of vehicles all driving with their turn signals blinking. Though I don't feel I am a judgmental person and only discriminate according to eyebrow color, I do still think we have the greatest city in the world that's built on a swamp, or any other kind of ground. As I travel around, I look at non-Fayette County people like the middle-earth people from "The Lord of the Rings." They might as well have those big, hairy feet (and some do). I especially have been reminded of all this as I travel around Atlanta. We think we have bad traffic here in Peachtree City, but we are still eons behind the bloated sprawl in other parts of metro Atlanta. I was in Marietta a few weeks ago and the expressway was backed up at 11 in the morning. It was a parking lot. Though there was some incident that caused the problem, there is always some incident that always causes some always frustrating slowdown. There could be an invasion from Mars, and you could be the last person on earth, but if you got on I-75 in Cobb County you would still be held up because the Martians decided to park their spaceship at the Windy Hill exit. Also recently, I had to drive to McDonough in Henry County. I was on the one-lane road where the Home Depot and Super Target are. The traffic was backed up over half a mile for no other reason than there were just too many cars (and tractors). I asked someone in the area if it was always like that and he said, "Like what?" Other people in other counties take it as normal to watch a traffic light change two and three times before actually getting through it. There are too many reasons to list why Peachtree City is the greatest place to live, like golf cart travel, great sports programs, plenty of restaurants, really nice people; but I think my favorite is how we center on family. Sure, we could all lay off giving so much to our kids and being too much about money, but everything seems to revolve around the unit of parent and child. And that's the next best way to do it after everything revolving around me.
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