The Truth About Preston Hollow

President GWB has his new digs back in his old haunt, Dallas. I have to correct something, though. It's rare that my life lines up with public figures, so I'll chip in here. Here's a blurb from the article:

The President and Laura Bush are going home - to the leafy, affluent neighborhood of Dallas where they lived before scoring public housing.

White House officials confirmed today that the Bushes had purchased a house in Dallas' Preston Hollow neighborhood, home to such out-sized Texas millionaires as T. Boone Pickens and Ross Perot.

The Bushes paid about $3 million for the sprawling 8,501-sq. ft. home, a source close to the deal told the Daily News.

I grew up in Preston Hollow. In fact, I remember driving past George W. Bush's house before he was governor. It would get pointed out that there lived the son of President Bush and did you know he owns the Texas Rangers? His house was no more than 5 streets over from mine.

Here's the thing: my family was nowhere near the wealthiest family in Dallas, let alone the state. Don't get me wrong, I grew up quite comfortably, but I'll be darned if it was upper-class. We were a standard upper-middle class family in a standard upper-middle class neighborhood. These are rough numbers in my memory, but our house was about 3200 sq feet, and it was about $400k-500k (I think). We also had a pool. Again, it was a nice house in a good neighborhood, but it wasn't opulent.

There were houses in our neighborhood that were big, and if you went a half-mile one way or another you could find a block that had large houses all in a row, but it was hardly the norm. Now, as we moved out to Colorado in 1999 we could already see a change as developers razed single-levels from the 1950's (like ours) and built multi-story houses, so maybe things are way different than I remember. This seems like such an over-reach on the part of the Daily News to fit the story into the Bush-is-an-out-of-touch-millionaire-sending-our-boys-to-die-all-while-ignoring-an-economic-armageddon-on-the-horizon meme.

And the moment's gone: my wonderfully humdrum life moves one way, one of the most powerful men in the world goes another.

UPDATE: I looked around for a few minutes, found the location of GWB's house, I was right: he's all of a .8 miles from my childhood house.





Truly, a small world, isn't it?