Danny Westneat’s column yesterday about his past on Aurora Avenue reminded me of my early days in Seattle. I also lived on Aurora Avenue–in a motel no less, which constitutes a kind of punch line in Seattle, synonymous with tackiness and sleaze. My then boyfriend (now husband), who is from Ireland, hated the strip, which wasn’t the kind of Americana he was looking for. But it didn’t faze me. We were only there for a week or two, we couldn’t afford anywhere else, and I come from the Midwest–where there is a fairly practical aesthetic. While I grew up in a beautiful, leafy neighborhood, I spent a lot of time at Dairy Queens, chili parlors and highway motels whose diners served bad coffee (not that I knew it then) and pancakes smothered with chocolate chips.I’ve come to think of Seattle as having a kind of tyranny of good taste, at least in certain circles. Houses, restaurants, gardens, food, they all have to be a certain way–or risk being put in the tacky Aurora Avenue category. A house that doesn’t have wood floors is considered practically unlivable. Which is too bad for us; we haven’t gotten enough savings together to put them in yet. That’s the thing about good taste–it’s expensive. I thought of that when I read the Seattle Times

story a couple months back about the janitor who had to forego wooden floors and granite countertops in the house he was building because the city was requiring him to put in a sidewalk. It seemed ridiculous that he had to pay for a sidewalk, but having to settle for carpet and Formica doesn’t constitute a tragedy in my world. It made me wonder how many people have gotten themselves into debt because it constitutes a tragedy in theirs.