Sometimes I find myself startled by surprisingly unthreatening things. Like the addresses in Logan, Utah.

It seems that the Mormons decided that building giant fortress temples and  Sci-Fi outposts on promontories was not really sufficient. They also needed to give their street names… numbers, specifically numbers showing that street’s coordinates from the central temple.

I appreciate a proper grid system, and thorough organization. I really do. But somehow this street-naming convention took me back to Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. I had a momentary shudder at the thought of ending up like a possessed Charles Wallace. I suspect that the omnipresent of “I’m A Mormon!” billboards were a factor as well….

After the initial shock wore off, I thought about the importance of street names to memory, for talking about one’s past, as something that made one place different than another. I started to feel bad for the wee Mormon children. And then, naturally, I extrapolated a What If.

What if, instead of growing up on Portland’s NW Evergreen Terrace, Matt Groening had been raised in Logan, Utah?

Now that is scary!

*with proper apologies to William F. Nolan (another great Northwesterner).