It has been nearly 30 years since Lewis Grizzard died, but one thing hasn’t changed since the famous Georgia humor columnist left us.
Grizzard joked about what a great city Atlanta was, and then said it would be really wonderful if they ever finished it. He said they started rebuilding the city after Sherman burned it in the closing months of the Civil War and they were starting to see the end in sight.
Most of the work in Grizzard’s day — and even now — has been repaving the roads.
Again and again and again.
We have lived in Georgia, an hour south of Atlanta, for nearly 13 years. We live just a few miles west of Interstate 75, one of the two biggest north-south routes east of the Mississippi River. I-75 starts at Sault Ste. Marie on the Canadian border and goes all the way to Miami.
For years we made at least one trip a month to and from Macon on I-75 to see one of Nicole’s doctors. The one thing apparent has been that I-75 between Atlanta and Macon always has some sort of roadwork going on.
It isn’t just the interstates either. Two miles to the west of us is the main state highway connecting us to Atlanta. We call it 1941, but it’s actually state routes 3, 19 and 41. If I turn south on 1941, it’s about five miles to our grocery store and it takes about 10 minutes to get there.
At least it once did. For the last few months, there has been all sorts of work — repaving, widening, whatever — going on, and yesterday it got terrible. It was about 5:20 p.m. when I came out of the store and got into my car to go home.
I figured to be home by 5:30.
I actually got home at 6:30.
I generally try to avoid 1941 and travel on back streets, but it slipped my mind yesterday and I turned onto the main road. Between lanes blocked off for road work, heavy traffic and a medium-sized accident, traffic heading north on 1941 was stopped dead.
For the better part of an hour, I felt like I was driving back in Los Angeles. We inched along a residential street cutting over to another north-south route, which was crawling along slowly for more than a mile.
Obviously we are on the fringes of a major metropolitan area, and when we do have to go to Atlanta, dealing with horrible traffic is part of the deal. We know that, but we live an hour south of Atlanta and I don’t expect to deal with city traffic in a town of 20,000 people.
We should have moved to a remote island.