Salina

In the summer of 1991, my family was planning a move. We didn't know where to yet, at the beginning of the summer, but my parents had decided to look for jobs in other towns and we were selling the farm equipment. Over the course of the past year, we had all decided together we wanted to move to a bigger town, and the two that were closest were Hays and Salina.
Hays was about 40 miles Northwest of us, and we were all very familiar with the town because we went shopping there almost every week. Both my parents had been taking college classes there and we often went with them on weeknights and stayed at my grandma Irene's apartment, watching TV and ordering Domino's Pizza. I loved to look out her window and watch the traffic (or what I considered to be traffic back at that naive stage in my life) go by on 27th street.
Salina, on the other hand, was about an hour and fifteen minutes east on I-70. Salina was considerably bigger than Hays, and we knew almost nothing about it. We knew noone who lived there and we had only gone there a handful of times on "vacation." (Yes, we would rent a room at a hotel that had a pool for a couple nights and that would be our vacation.)
Even at that tender age, I debated the pro's and con's of each town in my mind endlessly all spring, eager with the thought of new opportunities, new friends, new things to do. I imagined that if we moved to Salina, we would buy one of the big old boxy 2-story houses that I had seen whenever I could get my dad to drive me away from the shopping mall and out to The House of Sight and Sound, a dusty old record store that was one of my favorite places to go. I fantasized about having two best friends, one boy and one girl, and they would sneak into my second-floor bedroom by climbing up a tree or a ladder. Very Clarissa Explains It All. I think even at that age I was secretly plotting that the boy would really be my boyfriend and the girl would be my beard/our hag. As if Salina had some huge underground gay scene for 14 year olds. The obvious allures of Salina, in my mind, were the size (the population was over 60,000 which was huge by western Kansas standards) and the fact that we didn't know anyone there. I could start an entirely new life. I could reinvent myself. Heady thoughts for someone who had just recently graduated from junior high.
My mom had been interviewing for a job at Solomon, a town just a few minutes east of Salina, and at one point it looked certain we would be moving east. I was nervous and excited all at once.
At the last minute, something fell through, and my mom ended up taking a job at Palco, which oddly was about as far from Hays as it was Paradise, where we lived at the time. But we decided to go forward with our Hays plans, and my dad ended up getting a job at Hays High School. A year later, my mom got a job in Hays also at an elementary school.
Today as I was following highway K-18 (my old stomping grounds) on Google Earth, I ended up in Solomon and those memories, the ones of me and my two best friends climbing up to sneak into my room, came rushing back. Even though they were only ever in my mind, I could remember them as vividly as if they actually had happened. B-52's "Cosmic Thing" would be playing and we would be laughing and then we'd all go to the House of Sight and Sound, and then maybe walk out to the mall and look at the fish in the aquarium and eat some Sbarro (or Sombrero as Brandon used to mispronounce it) Pizza. For a moment, I wondered how my life might be different if we had ended up moving to Salina. Would I have still ended up moving to LA? Or would I have just migrated slightly further east to Kansas City - where my parents ended up? It's amusing to think about, but I musn't waste much time on it, because here I am in Los Angeles with things to do and people to see. It's always nice to think about what could've been though. And I don't just mean the song by Tiffany.