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Tuesday, January 15, 2013

The Light Brown or Tan Buick -- what it says about my neighbors in the suburbs

Hi folks -- I was just going over my lecture material this morning for the first real class tomorrow and thought of the ever-pervasive brown or tan Buick that is driven by those typically over 50 in my suburb of Centerville Ohio. I can't get away from them around here, and I seemingly always encounter one lagging in the left lane on Far Hills as I go to and from work. If the driver is male, he seems to always have pattern baldness. Whether male or female, time is catching up with them. One in four and five are so short they are shrunk below the headrest, almost all wear some kind of glasses, and sunglasses can be those plastic wrap-around kind
The color, light brown, suggests a kind of blandness, like life is for all purposes no longer exciting, but rather placid.  The owner wants to be in the background, and perhaps the color also is a reflection of youth spent in the 1950s, when consensus in America ruled the day. But I should not be so hard, for I am quickly becoming one of these folks. After years of toil and trouble, there is a longing for peacefulness, for things that work without any trouble, for reliability without time  or money spent on much upkeep. We of this generation have earned a rest from the tumult of life, and the Buick delivers with little fan fare.

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