"This neighborhood isn't so bad. So what if you see crackheads and working girls walking up and down the street. They don't bother me and I don't bother them," my sister called yesterday to inquire about my whereabouts. She'd been informed I was living in a rough area of Las Vegas. The truth being I see the area I call home as a Garden of Eden. I would never ever use the word rough to describe it.
"Fred said it was scary when he came to visit you. He also said the house you live in was way worse than how you described. Do you ever hear gunshots in your neighborhood?" My friend Fred was in town last week and I gave him a tour of my neighborhood. He didn't say it, but I know he found it a cultural shock - "Look," I tell my sister, "If Fred was to spend a little time in the area it would grow on him like it has grown on me. And to answer your question about gunshots, yeah, I hear them every once in a while, but as long as they ain't firing them at me. Why should I care?"
We chat a little more about the weather and then she says - "It sounds like you're the only white guy around your place. Doesn't that make you nervous," the first thirty five years of my life were spent in a predominantly white neighborhoods in Kansas -- which was fine. The problem being, and I hate to sound cliche - we ain't in Kansas anymore - "Look," I say again to my sister, "There is a thousand more times to grow for a guy like me in the eight blocks or so I roam in North Las Vegas than I would ever find in the whole state of Kansas. That's the way I see it. I have decided to live or die with what North Las Vegas is willing to give me."
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