Then when I get asked, sometimes quizzically, “You’re from here?” and I reply, “Yes,” the next question is, “Where’d you go to school?”
This doesn’t mean Virginia Commonwealth University, where I spent six arduous years scrupulously avoiding math requirements, and then trying to learn in the Spanish language in three crammed classes.
No, that refers to high school.
I think this shibboleth needs overturning. Frankly, you are distinctively Richmond if the hospital where your nativity occurred went apartment/condo. Check mine, Richmond Memorial. Then you have Stuart Circle, Johnston Willis and Grace Hospital.
But even beyond that, I think you’re a Richmonder if you get "The Twinge.”
I got it when reading the news yesterday morning about the refurbishing of the executive offices in City Hall.
I guess I’m supposed to be annoyed by this, considering the thousands of dollars involved, but, to me, it’s deferred maintenance. I lately spent some time roaming the halls of the place, and I have to tell you, while not exactly a dump, it’s fairly close.
Not long ago, the heating and air conditioning of the building was out of whack. Despite the vaunted “re-cladding” that stopped portions of the cornice from falling on the sidewalk, the building’s insides still date from 1971. It is lowest-bidder municipal construction, with metropolitan hues of taupe and ecru, as well as bad fluorescents, all of which give the impression of a place you could wash out by lifting off the roof and inserting a hose. The best part about the building is its under-utilized observation deck.
But no, “The Twinge” didn’t come from the money getting spent during a downturn in the economy or from the kvetchers and cavilers online at the Times-Dispatch tut-tutting about a “cesspool of corruption.” It didn’t really activate, either, when my next-door office neighbor, editor Jack Cooksey, said the new curtains in the Mayor’s office look like the sliding blackout variety from 1970s Holiday Inns. It’s not the money that’s disconcerting, it’s the appalling bad taste.
One poster put it well: What do we expect, that the mayor’s office should be in a trailer in the back?
It is our City Hall and should reflect the higher standards of Richmond, and be dressed to impress whatever visitor or stranger happens to show up there.
“The Twinge” to me occurred about halfway into the newspaper article, being familiar with the several years of City Hall’s physical-plant plaints. And I thought: We just should’ve never moved out of Old City Hall. Richmond transacted its political, municipal and judicial business there from 1895 to 1977.
“The Twinge,” for a Richmonder, is this: If the mayor still had his office in that grand building, the repairs would be renovations, not remodeling. Nobody would question it as anything but necessary.
And please. No light-bulb jokes.
