Came home from work with a lot of thoughts. brimming with thoughts.

Where is America (USA) now? I don’t see it in Boston, I’m too used to Boston. But I see glimpses of it in New York and when I visit Nashville. I saw it on the interstate when I was growing up, every summer on the family trip from Nashville to New England. I saw it moving to Boston in November 2000, with my dad in his pickup truck… leaving a Virginia motel at 6am, watching the sun rise over the Shenandoah mountains as we sped down the interstate. And at a big truck stop in Kentucky where truckers sat at a long row of poker machines and NASCAR racing video games. Sometimes I see it when I get off the highway for gas and have to drive a couple miles to find the station.

Chris Alexander, from The Timeless Way of Building, got me thinking this way:

Isn’t it true that the features which you remember most in a place are not so much peculiarities, but rather the typical, the recurrent, the characteristic features: the canals of Venice, the flat roofs of a Moroccan town, the even spacing of fruit trees in an orchard, the slope of a beach towards the sea, the umbrellas of an Italian beach, the wide sidewalks, sidewalk cafes, cylindrical poster boardings and pissoirs of Paris, the porch which goes all the way around a plantation house in Louisiana…

What could be more typical than the interstate?