I love Peachtree City. I know

many people take me wrong sometimes in my little "humor" columns

because I like to make fun of all our little idiosyncrasies. Rather, it

is really more like how I am in a family and you have to just call attention

the fact that we are all rather silly sometimes. Believe me, I have been

other places and Peachtree City is the best.

Since 1978 I have lived in

East Point, Macon, Lilburn, Lithonia, Clarkston and Decatur. I list these

in no particular order as to further confound old credit card companies

and college loan officials. Most of these locations were while I was single

and living in cheap, basement apartments, or what I lovingly call "radon

pits" (Should I be growing this sixth toe?). East Point was dull,

Macon was depressing, Lilburn was congested and Lithonia was damp.

Clarkston was just plain scary

and Decatur, though cool, was old. It's just plain tough, grocery shopping

to the smell of liniment. In Peachtree City we have special parking spaces

for pregnant mothers. In Decatur they had special spaces for walkers,

oxygen tanks, and an on-call ambulance. The Kroger had a double aisle

for "Depends." The city was a perpetual spider web of vehicles

all driving with their turn signals blinking.

Though I don't feel I am a

judgmental person and only discriminate according to eyebrow color, I

do still think we have the greatest city in the world that's built on

a swamp, or any other kind of ground. As I travel around, I look at non-Fayette

County people like the middle-earth people from "The Lord of the

Rings." They might as well have those big, hairy feet (and some do).

I especially have been reminded

of all this as I travel around Atlanta. We think we have bad traffic here

in Peachtree City, but we are still eons behind the bloated sprawl in

other parts of metro Atlanta. I was in Marietta a few weeks ago and the

expressway was backed up at 11 in the morning. It was a parking lot. Though

there was some incident that caused the problem, there is always some

incident that always causes some always frustrating slowdown.

There could be an invasion

from Mars, and you could be the last person on earth, but if you got on

I-75 in Cobb County you would still be held up because the Martians decided

to park their spaceship at the Windy Hill exit.

Also recently, I had to drive

to McDonough in Henry County. I was on the one-lane road where the Home

Depot and Super Target are. The traffic was backed up over half a mile

for no other reason than there were just too many cars (and tractors).

I asked someone in the area if it was always like that and he said, "Like

what?" Other people in other counties take it as normal to watch

a traffic light change two and three times before actually getting through

it.

There are too many reasons

to list why Peachtree City is the greatest place to live, like golf cart

travel, great sports programs, plenty of restaurants, really nice people;

but I think my favorite is how we center on family. Sure, we could all

lay off giving so much to our kids and being too much about money, but

everything seems to revolve around the unit of parent and child. And that's

the next best way to do it after everything revolving around me.