Troy, OH

Found this in an archived email the other day. It's from 4/08. I'm editing the original as I enter it, as there are parts that applied only to that trip, and are not pertinent, like my daughter's inability to sleep when traveling a year + ago; info about funerals, etc.

Read on.

Troy, OH.
You know where it is.
Everyone knows where it is.

You mean, you DON'T know where Troy, OH is?
Don't get out much, do you?

Troy's 15 miles north of Dayton, right on I-75.
It was a sleepy town when I was a kid. is not a bigger, slightly more caffeinated town. A Honda plant and the realization that you can live in a nice clean little community and still work in Dayton, has caused the growth.

It was a company town forever, the company being Hobart Bros. My grandfather worked there for 40+ years.
Troy has a big Strawberry Festival every spring.
Kids ride their bikes in the street; walk to school; get ice cream at the United Dairy; smoke cigarettes on a park bench on the levee; and grow up either counting the days until they can get out; or not thinking at all about leaving town, for any reason, ever.

I spent countless weekendes of my childhood in this place. Riding my grandpa's old ballon tire, pedal brake bike.
Bowling, playing cards...
Stopped going there with any kind of regularity when we were old enough to beg off the trips down. Weekend jobs and then college allowed for me to skip out on the mind-numbingly dull drives through IN and west central OH.

It was cool, driving around, trying to find the various places my grandparents lived, and goofy stuff like
"Wasn't there a bike trail along the levee, that started right....There!"
"Holy crap, where'd the farmland go?"
"Remember when we hit Aunt Missy's dog with the lawn dart?"
(It was an accident of course. We loved Babe, who was a teriffic black lab...)

And I got to do this with my brother and sis, which made it more fun.

Apparently, the town re-configured the strets aruond the (round) town square. Now, to get around downtown Troy, you have to traverse the square by yielding to traffic from the left, scooting into the circle, and then getting out where you need to.
This is not rocket science. Folks in the UK have been not crashing into each other at these interchanges since cars were invited, probably.
My mom could not wrap her head around this, and would lead us on ridiculous detours to avoid it. We stopped letting her drive shortly after we arrived.

I can only imagine the outrage and the letters to the editro that the decision to re-configure caused. I can clearly remember my grandmother complaining about the hoodlums that would drive around the square on weekend nights, playing their car radios too loud, 25+ years ago.

Apparently, the town square is nothing but trouble, no matter when you grow up there.

The weather was great, spring was in full bloom, and I got my haircut at 8am on a monday morning, at Walmart. All talk was on the earthquake that occurred a couple of days before my trip.

Strangers said good mornig to me, just because our paths crossed. Unless it was after noon. Then they said "good afternoon".
Mostly they said "What a beautiful baby!" which always works.

unless you don't have a baby, then it's just weird.

Troy's a nice town, with NICE people.

See, you DO know where Troy, OH is.
It exists under hundreds of different names, all over the USofA.

And as I rode to work on the El train upon returning, in a train car that smelled of urine and disinfectant, I thought about how nice it would be to live in a Troy, OH somewhere.