The bubble

I live today less than a mile from the garage apartment where my folks lived when I was born. Although I have lived in Edmond and far north Oklahoma City, I find as I grow older that I want to stay closer and closer to the old neighborhood. I used to want to go no farther west than Meridian; now I'm down to May. I didn't like going any farther north than Quail Springs; now Penn Square seems uncomfortably distant. I start getting antsy when I can't see the OCU library.

I discovered when I started hanging out at the Red Cup that a lot of people feel the same way I do, and that their arbitrary 'comfort zones' are about the same as mine: May or Portland to the west, 50th to 63rd north, Santa Fe or Lincoln to the east and Reno to the south (although I can do SW 44 –– my grandmother had friends who lived in Capitol Hill when I was a kid, and I don't feel out of place there).

This area, which some folks call 'the bubble,' is also roughly the northwest corner of Oklahoma City during the forties and fifties, before annexation of hundreds of square miles of open farm land briefly made Oklahoma City the largest city in the world in area. It is an area where the houses are all old, the streets all laid out in grids and neighborhoods are filled with tall pecan and elm trees.

Actually, there are days when the borders of my bubble are the edges of my bed. But I have to get up anyway.