My Unwelcome Growth Spurt

Growing up in Charleston, South Carolina, I thought I lived in a big city.

It wasn't as though I had never seen a big city. I visited my father in Charlotte, Atlanta and Chicago.

Somehow, though, I would walk through the streets of Charleston with my friends (perhaps a first sign that it wasn't a big city) and think I was someplace where something was happening.

I was partially right. Charleston (at the time, population - about 100,000 plus its suburbs) was a metropolis. Unfortunately, it was a metropolis from about 1720-1861 and then, after, only it its mind.

Charleston had laws set up to keep it from modernizing. No building could be built higher than the church steeples.

In Mount Pleasant, the "burrough" in which I lived, no building could be built higher than the tree line.

The one structure that reached out above these rules, was the Cooper River Bridges. Two twin bridges, which connected Charleston and Mount Pleasant, were only allowed the exception so that the city could maintain a viable port.


from Charleston.net

Now, the rules that kept the city stuck in 1861 have been forgotten.


from siteselection.com

Almost one year ago, the new Ravenel Bridge opened. The road bed of the bridge towered over the obsolete bridges of my youth.

The city was dwarfed by its newest skyline feature. The bridge doesn't fit in the 1800's image that it tried to maintain.


from ravenelbridge.net

The city tried to grow up 160 years after it had decided to stop, and it now appear to have gotten to old.

It was a planned growth spurt, something that people don't really have the ability to do.

After you finish growing physically, you still have some growth spurts to go through. Some are good, some are not good.

That morning you wake up and your body hurts from just being you.

When you can no longer shake off that night out as quickly.

Sometimes you wake up one morning and realize you got old last night. And that is never a welcome growth spurt.