Friday, May 2, 2008

My childhood home

Want to see the house in which I spent 18 continuous years of my life, plus a few assorted summers?

Here:

View Larger Map

Google Street View is kind of creepy.

It's also wrong. If you click on the "larger map" link, it will tell you I grew up in toney Leawood, KS. Although 66206 is largely a Leawood zip-code, I grew up in more modest Overland Park. If you have a Sprint cell phone, you have perhaps heard of it (though it shows up on Bullock's AmEx bill as Roverland Park, which cracks me up -- Dog Park, KS!).

Oh, and btw, my porn name is either Emily (first pet) Windsor, or Marie (middle name) Windsor, neither of which sound at all porny. Indeed, they sound like distant members of the royal family.

Speaking of Englishness, the street behind us was Canterbury. Yeah, I was destined to be an Anglophile and a medievalist.

10 comments:

Horace said...

Looks a lot like the house I grew up in....

BTW, I have a good friend from undergrad who lives in, and may have grown up in Overland Park. Perhaps we Should compare notes sometime...

Janice said...

It looks like a nice house to have called your home. Were the trees as verdant then as now?

heu mihi said...

My parents are from Kansas! Only about 200 miles west of you, it seems.

And my porn name is Rosie Flower. (Or Sybil Flower, technically. We had two concurrent pets.) Just thought that that was worth mentioning.

The Pastry Pirate said...

my porn name is chico curtis. apparently it's some kind of tranny thing, i guess. and i must have seen a photo of your house at some point in college because it's exactly how i thought it would look. huh.

Anonymous said...

See, I actually love Google street view, but that's because it lets me look at apartments from the comfort of my home!

Sadly, my childhood home isn't street-view-ified (and is probably too far back from the road to be seen, anyway), nor is the house we bought in Rural Utopia. But I just took a little wander down memory lane and looked at the apartments I lived in during grad school and the adjunct year. Damn, did I ever actually live in those places? They just look so disconnected from me! (You're all lucky I can't figure out how to copy the picture like you did or I'd inflict them all on you!)

And I love my porn name - it's Hawkins Sudbury. (I can't do the middle name version because I don't have one, that was our dog.)

highlyeccentric said...

My porn name is apparently Budge Rivendell, which sounds more a like a wrestling stage name.

I lived in Rivendell Cresent, and around the corner from Hobbit's Glen. Clearly, I was destined to be a Tolkien-o-phile, from which starting place I've arrived at Medievalist.

What Now? said...

I haven't experimented with Google Streetview and thus wasn't as clever as NK in using it to assist with house-hunting.

All of the junior highs in my county were named after 19th-century American authors -- I went to Washington Irving Junior High -- and perhaps that pushed me toward my American Studies angle.

Dr. Virago said...

Pirate -- Yes, I did have a picture of it with me in college. Plus, it looks like just about every other midwestern mid-century ranch house.

Horace - yes, we shall have to compare notes. Though OP is very, very sprawling, and I went to 12 years of Catholic schools, so chances are I didn't cross paths with your friend.

Janice -- although they weren't quite as big, they were just as verdant. I spent a lot of time climbing trees as a child.

And I'm laughing at everyone's porn names, especially Highly Eccentric's Elvish one!

Bardiac said...

It does look very midwestern :)

My addresses don't seem to come up on the street view. I'm not sure what that means.

Tommy said...

So THAT'S what the place looks like... yeah, that's pretty much what I imagined it to look like all those years I was sending letters that weighed upwards of a half pound there (wonderful thing, technology...).

And my porn name is... drumroll, please... Pilgrim Schneider! Best! Porn name! Of all time! Brings to mind some saucy and ribald Mayflower action, no?