I thought all was good with me handling this summer's heat until this past Sunday, when I drove to my mom's house to help with yardwork. I'm pretty sure that if she weren't 95 years old and also prone to hot temperature misfortunes, she would have done the work herself.
There was a time that, even after the work was done and seeing two large truck dumper beds full of debris from her yard, she could have managed to flex her muscles and do it alone. But not Sunday.
So, there I was at 8:30 in the morning armed with only two snippers and a lawn rake. I began working in my little corner of her yard. Three hours later, I was sick as a dog. Not any dog, but that dog you see in the middle of nowhere. The dog with his long tongue banging the highway, wobbling down the road, with cuts and scratches.
It was so bad that I dropped a couple F-bombs while casually talking to a pre-teen relative. Flushed sick or not, I shouldn't have let that happen.
So, I drove home, which was dumb. It isn't a far stretch to determine that if I couldn't control my tongue, I also couldn't control an automobile on I-15.
There are gaps I won't fill in—like yes, I drank water; yes, I sought shade; no, I didn't think the heat was that severe. But it was, apparently.
The next day, Monday, I had an unrelated doctor's appointment. Almost 24 hours after my Sunday F-bombs, my blood pressure was 99 over 60. That seems low to me, especially considering I'm on high blood pressure medication that in 20 years hasn't gotten my BP to even normal levels, let alone a reading like that one.
But today? Ahhh, I feel like a new feller. Drove into work, had a few meetings and drank some coffee—did you know coffee has healing effects on persons with certain liver diseases? Well, it does—so, drink up.
After several meetings, I left around noon to drive home. But unlike my typical custom of driving directly south from our office, I diverted onto 200 South from which I figured I'd just turn south down West Temple, Main Street or State Street.
I had a bit of déjà vu right there. Oh, yeah—in the 1980s and 1990s, the city ripped up Main Street at least three different times with sundry beautification plans and Trax buildouts. Remember the beautiful new kiosks on Main, with the telephones and newspaper racks mounted in them? Garbage. Remember the chessboard tables? Yeah, all gone.
But at the time, the city was paying top-dollar-by-damn to improve our aesthetic downtown core so that people would return to spend money there like drunken sailors, just like in the olden days.
And they did come, but not due to kiosks or chesstables, nor for new trees or shiny bricks. They came because then-Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. and then-Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson both worked at different angles to release Utah's hospitality industry from the dual shackles of insanity and too much government intrusion. That's what did it, not some city beauty pageant.
When COVID began and wreaked its own havoc downtown, our politicians and business leaders were asking public help to keep our hospitality industry afloat. Order out. Tip more. When COVID "ended," the pleas to help the industry dried up as said politicians moved on to saucier rally cries like being or not being "woke."
Meanwhile, not all of downtown did recover. Many lunch spots in the central core are nowhere near pre-COVID levels of revenue as workers are not in any rush to return to office environments. Sure, those shiny new apartments seem to be filling up, and that helps with nightlife, but it's hit and miss.
Conventions are coming back, but not even the Outdoor Retailer show has moved the needle far for businesses not anchored to the Salt Palace or nearly so. In the past, conventioneers walked many blocks from their hotels past scads of restaurants and clubs to get to a seminar.
They no longer need to. When cities say they need this or that to grow a city, they don't really care which entity of this or that pays the taxes to support it. Honestly, is there a person in city hall who gives a fig about how a sandwich shop is doing on Main Street when, two blocks away, there are bigger hoagies to fry?
That's why there's little hue and cry to support the businesses along 200 South that are getting rolled over as construction crews—what are they even building, anyway?—have been moving dirt for what seems like a decade. Is it bothersome to anyone else that while politicians boast about Utah growth and strong economies, that iconic businesses like Johnny's on Second on one side of the street and the historic Gallenson's Guns and Ammo on the other are getting their butts kicked?
Their particular stretch of 200 South looks like downtown Baghdad. Several businesses there have said they won't survive or must move, which won't matter a whit to city officials. They know that when construction ends, a new business will take those spaces over. It doesn't matter to a city who pays the taxes, just that someone does.
That's when a city really suffers. When it loses its soul. When it doesn't do enough to help the little guys on any single stretch of road. That's an old tale on 200 South, which has had its soul ripped out multiple times. It's déjà vu all over again, even making this Greek afraid to cross lanes at 400 East for a Crown burger.
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