Oklahoma City, a place I have never visited as an adult until yesterday, was always just a placeholder in my mind — where my great aunts live(d), a prairie town eager to be a metropolis, an awkward entity in a number of ways (a city located in a state where cities are despised as saltmills for the liberal and heathens of the world). Of my native-born extended family, this is the city where most of them have lived. And there is something here worth exploring — whether it’s the family connection or merely just a place whose boulevards are wide enough for slow traversing.
Truth be told, I am more historically Oklahoman than I am Texan by far. And that right there is the essence of today’s Oklahoma City — it is more Texan than Texas. It is what Texas was, before the era of mass suburbia, mass immigration, corporate relocations, and office parks. OKC’s skyline had its adolescence in the pre-war period, and has been stuck a marvelous jello suspension since the 1970’s. It’s a delight to be able to walk around a central business district as if it were a museum exhibit, with nobody there to bother you, the buildings sequestered figuratively behind an imaginary velvet rope.
Oklahoma City is sadly one of the most conservative cities of its size in the United States, but my cousin Carrie showed me that there’s still a bit of a deviant, almost hipster like quality to some of its attractions — it certainly blows the pants off of Austin in terms of architecture, vernacular architecture at least. If you want a hundred year old house with dumbwaiter and quirky paint job, you can take your pick, and pick it up for a song.
I will hopefully be back in November for my cousin Carrie’s wedding. But for now, I have to head back down to Texas, where I live but not where I love to live. Before I go, I’ll pull down the roof on the convertible and enjoy the 89 degree dryness that slides though the gaps in the six-lane roads with impossibly wide rights of way. Just like Texas, it’s one of the few places that seems sad and gloomy when it’s sunny. I could go for a thunderstorm right about now, but in the absence of rain, a song about gloomy sundays will have to suffice. I’ll be sure to share all my photos when I get back.
