Someone made a website for the town I grew up in!

[xiphias]

http://www.arlingtontour.com/

The thing is, the town really is a lot like that. I liked the place growing up; still do, as a matter of fact. As I used to say, "It's a nice place to live, but you wouldn't want to visit there."

As it is, I'm one of a very small number of urban-ish Gen-X-ers who grew up in a neighborhood where we didn't lock the doors, our neighbors sat on their porches and would just chat with folks, and would always come over to lend a hand if you needed anything, and like that. It is, fundamentally, a dull town. That's not really a bad quality in the town one grew up in.

Comments

[jenett]

I grew up in Winchester (next town over, for all the non-Boston-suburbs knowing folks out there.)

I'm actually rather fond of Arlington too. I spent a fair bit of time both in the center, and out in Arlington Heights when I was doing summer classes at Harvard (easiest place to do bus transfers or pick up a bus for the two routes I was using regularly. My mom would drop me off there, and I'd take the bus in.) I actually liked it better than Winchester's fairly pretentious downtown (at least as I got older).

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Heh. I love the police reports - they remind me of my first newspaper job, which included stopping by the police station on the way to work every morning to transcribe just those sorts of incidents. Around this time of year, the reports were all about drunken ice fishermen getting in fights or falling through holes in the ice...

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

My all-time favorite police blotter thing comes from Wayland, the town that my parents now live in.

"3 pm: report of young girl menaced by a bee on (whatever street it was). When an officer arrived, the bee had fled the scene."

I just love that. It was a bee. A police officer was dispatched to rescue the girl from the bee. The bee fled.

It just leads to all sorts of wonderful mental images: if the bee hadn't fled, might they have ended up with a hostage situation? "I'm serious, man -- back off, or I'll sting her! I will, man, don't fuck with me!"

Or the image of the bee being led off wearing in three little-itty-bitty pairs of handcuffs. . .

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

yeah, I grew up in a similar place in NJ. it's the sort of place that's great to grow up in, but doesn't seem like it at the time, because you don't appreciate things like low crime and good schools until you're an adult thinking about having kids of your own.

my mom (who's in her late 60s) still lives there; the neighbors help her mow the lawn, shovel the snow out of the driveway, etc.

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Very much agreed. A reason I like my old home town... even if at times Dad did treat it like Brooklyn, where he grew up.