Delaine asks where we went on vacation. I went to Dreamland, and came back to earth.
I usually plan vacations months in advance. It's my nature - I love to plan, and I'm happier when I know what's coming - and also the nature of my life, since we have to juggle call schedules and Sam's workshops and Eve's ballet classes. Last week was an unexpected break. I was supposed to teach at a CME course, but budgets have been slashed and they didn't need me, so I decided to take Eve - on short notice! arranged just a week ahead of time! - to see friends in Smalltown. Our friends moved there last winter, and they keep saying it's like living in a Norman Rockwell painting. There's a even a candy store in biking distance, and the kids can go on their own. Eve was entranced with the idea and we set off.
Norman Rockwell indeed. They live on a tree-lined street, broad and quiet; clapboard colonials and Victorian houses have real front porches, where people actually sit and chat with each other and with their neighbors walking by. The kids played in the yard and on the neighbor's trampoline (one bloody nose, which bothered me more than it did the kid in question) and didn't seem to mind the mosquitoes enough to want to come inside. Eve and her compatriot did indeed ride their bikes to the candy shop, coming home with a yard of bubble gum, bags of Tootsie Rolls, and enough violently dyed sweet stuff to keep their tongues discolored for weeks.
We found small local museums and state parks with hiking trails and quaint pavilions; we admired bunting left in place from Memorial Day until Fourth of July; we ate dinner at the seasonal drive-in, where the adults lingered over sweet-potato fries while the kids rioted around the attached playground. Eve and I had breakfast at the independent coffee shop, watching the local hippie subculture come and go, and admiring the real, live, surviving downtown: not a chain store to be seen. Our friends, who have only lived in town for six months, met people they knew everywhere we went, and I felt welcomed into their circle as completely as I was in their home.
It only took a day for me to start fantasizing about a life in Smalltown, or its equivalent. Wouldn't it be great for Eve to walk to school? To ride her bike to the library on her own? To have friends right down the street, and a teenaged babysitter next door? An early 20th century house with high ceilings and my own shaded front porch would be a lovely place to spend the summer days, wouldn't it?
But what about religious school? whispers my practical brain. What about High Holidays? Are there any Jews here? Is this the sort of Small Town that has an official Town Christmas Tree? Would one of those nice people who smiled at my daughter at the drive-in someday tell me she'd gotten a good deal because she Jewed someone down? OK, now we've moved from the practical to the paranoid, I scold myself, and it was only a fantasy. Back off.
No vacation is perfect, and on the last day it rained, so we took the kids to lunch in Resort City nearby, heading back into chain-store country and treating them to Friendly's. I drove; our van had the car seats all set up, anyway. We emerged into the drizzle, trying to keep the children from completely soaking themselves in the puddles, and walked toward our parking spot - and realized that my "Question War" magnet had been neatly ripped into three pieces and placed back on the tailgate. Maybe I'm not so paranoid after all.
Later that day, as the two of us drove to Grandma's, Eve says "Mommy, why did someone tear up our magnet? I feel scared. Why don't they like us?"
Why, indeed, Evie. Why indeed.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
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10 comments:
Thanks for the cool site though.
My jaw dropped at the end of your post. My own half-Asian family is nervous about small towns, too.
Remember when that Sarah Palin speech talked about small towns growing real Americans? Mm-hmm, if they're white. And Christian. We grow awesome people in big cities, too, and they tend not to be afraid of people who look different from them, or who came from other countries, or who are openly gay.
Wow. I can't believe anyone would rip up a magnet that said simply "question war." It's not even outright anti-war, or anti any particular war. So they're against the idea of even questioning it? And enough to rip it up? Yikes!
Any time I vacation in small towns, I yearn for the big city after a day or so. Our stay in New Mexico was lovely, but I wouldn't want to live there. Waaaay too small for me. I never feel that way about San Fran, though. 8-)
Cate, the magnet is a takeoff on the ubiquitous yellow-ribbon magnets that say "Support Our Troops", so in the US, and particularly in conservative areas, it's clearly a protest against the invasion of Iraq. If I'd been driving Sam's car, I'd have been in worse trouble - he still has his "Republicans for Voldemort" sticker on his bumper.
Orange, don't you think Palin's speech was a racist/anti-intellectual dogwhistle, implying that only white rural (men, I'm sure) are "real" Americans? It rang all my "get the hell out of here before they kill you" bells. And I think she insulted some of the very wonderful people I know who grew up - and still live - in small towns, and who have the real American values of acceptance and open-mindedness.
Because it makes little people feel big, destroying things. You, my dear, because you take ballet, are never to feel so little that you make other people feel bad to make yourself feel good.
therapydoc, that's a really interesting response. I've tried to avoid diminishing other people when I talk with Eve, but even I don't mind too much saying something bad about vandals!
Hi,
AB here, Jay's smalltown friend. (She of the bloody-nosed, purple-tongued child.) I was shocked about the magnet episode. And Orange, it is true that we unfortunately have little diversity here and diversity in general -- racial or economic -- is not a strength of small towns.
But I agree with Jay that acceptance and open-mindedness are the true American values, and most of my neighbors do, too. Not all of them, obviously... but are you really going to tell me there are no bigots in big cities? I think these are matters of degree, and probably smaller degrees than many people think.
As for dkzody's post, I lived in San Francisco for a year before attending college at Berkeley, and I loved it at the time. But the contrast between how narrow-minded many people there are, and how superior they feel to the Red-Staters who are narrow-minded on a different part of the opinion spectrum, has since really become very jarring to me. I think San Francisco is in its own way a very conformist place.
And dkzody, I didn't mean o imply that you personally are either narrow-minded or feel superior to anyone else in any-colored state. Sorry if my post could be read that way. I was making an observation on San Francisco and some San Franciscans, not you.
-AB
AB, sure, there are bigots in big cities. But there's a critical mass of diversity that can offset them and make a mixed-race family, immigrant, same-sex couple, etc., feel right at home. We fit right in here. In small-town America there are kind and open-hearted people, to be sure, but we wouldn't see ourselves reflected among them nearly to the degree that we do in the city.
I don't want my son to feel "other" or be perceived as "other" the way he might well be in a more homogeneous (i.e. whiter) setting. Even if nobody objects to the "otherness," it's still there in a way it isn't in our neighborhood and school.
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