Life in a small town

one thought

Prairie Home Companion

so popular because it hits a chord

Lack of connectivity with places and the past isn't a small town vs. big city issue. Feelings of rootlessness are a consequence of the freedom of mobility we enjoy in this country.

Not everybody who lives in a city came there from somewhere else. Lots of us were born in the city and still live and work in the neighborhoods where we grew up. My daily commute takes me past the place where I was born, the spot where I first kissed my future wife, the jr. high school we both attended, the house where my Grandmother raised my Father, and where my Father raised me, the cemetary where my Grandmother is buried, and the church where her funeral service was held.

Of course, that same route takes me past a welfare office, a methadone clinic, and the place where I was once threatened by teenage gang members late one night coming home from my first job at McDonalds. Yep, exactly like lots of small towns :).

I love this place. I'll never leave. The best part is, I don't have to. I'm able to make a living here and raise my family here.

Re: Of course, that same route takes me past a welfare office, a methadone clinic, and the place where I was once threatened by teenage gang members late one night coming home from my first job at McDonalds. Yep, exactly like lots of small towns :).

Small towns are not idyllic Shangri-Las. Lots and lots of rural people are on welfare-- the rural economy has almost always been terrible, one reason so many rural people end up moving out. and the crystal meth epidemic has devestated rural America.

I'm from the next town over; went to Catawba Middle School. I'm an avid reader of First Things and this blog--imagine my surprise when I first read this this morning. I think he's right; I've come to think that small towns--with their emphasis on memory, story, and place--are the last (though, sadly receding) lines of defense against the encroaching barbarism. (Well, in addition to monasteries). As he indicates, it's a mixed bag, but at least there's continuity and shared culture.

Side note -- I have family that just bought some land outside of Catawba and now have chickens and 2 cows (which they're trying to get certified as grass-fed). Very crunchy, quite con.

I'm a gay man who grew up on a farm near a town in Texas maybe 1/5 the size of Rod's St. Francisville and who moved to San Francisco the day Harvey Milk was assassinated. Then my parents needed help and I moved back, and I've been here 12 years.

I've found that if I'm not in-your-face about issues of my personal life--and I really wouldn't care for my very-Catholic (and exactly two Orthodox) straight neighbors to yell at me about their sexual orientation--I'm generally accepted. I'm known for having helped my parents during their decline, paying my bills on time, lending a helping hand when neighbors needed it. If you keep your sex life you business, my neighbors have more important things to deal with.

Aside from orientation, by the way, I ascribe to a lot that's traditional in relationships. Honesty, trust, and list of priorities of which physicality is nowhere near the top. (Never has been.)

There really is a web of relationships in small towns, for better or for worse. If you live and love long enough, it's for better. But I do find it impossible to imagine having spent my whole life here.

Along the lines of what Mike said, I would comment that those who haven't grown up in a city may underestimate the degree to which the same attributes of a community are found in a city. I am the executive director of a non-profit association that has an unusual name or so I thought when as a ten year old boy I walked by our headquarters and asked my father what the word meant. That was forty-two years ago. I work about six blocks from where I grew up. Things have changed some -- the corner grocery where my mother's butcher worked is now a trendy yuppie restaurant. I live in a different neighborhood now but still close enough that I can drive home for lunch just like my father did when I was a kid. The neighborhood I do live in is the one where I got my first job after high school in a clothing factory. Up the street from me is one of the guys I worked with them -- living in the house that he had lived in then and his parents had left him. All over the city, a city that a generation ago was one of the top ten cities population-wise in the United States, I run into people that I went to high school or the state university or the state law school with, anywhere from 25-35 years ago. A couple of Fridays ago, I was working late and I was the last one in the building when the UPS man came by. I asked him if he knew a high school buddy of mine who I had run into about twenty years ago --- ten years after we had been in school together -- turned out this UPS man and my old friend are great friends. As it happens, I did a stint at UPS in the meantime. All over this city and state,there are people that I share the bonds of high school or college or an early job with. It's not exactly like the small town but I think it's more rooted than the small towner might think.

Nobody would call Virginia Beach a 'small town'. Or the neighboring Norfolk. However, my family has lived here for years, know people all over town, and have a network of family and friends as close and as connected, or in some cases moreso, than any I've encountered in many a small town.

My best friends live in a small town in Minnesota. There's neighbors they know, and those who think of them still as newcomers and snub them after being there for more than ten years.

I've also met people who have lived in the same block of streets in very large cities. They can have that same connectedness and network.

And I will also vouch that rural areas and small towns have become a serious drug haven. My FIRST exposure to crack was in a tiny town in Ohio. I had to move from San Diego to Millvill to meet my first crackhead.

Small town cliches aren't always, or even mostly, true.

Lots of good comments on this thread. I agree that a lack of stability (that is, the opposite of mobility) is what creates that lack of community we lament. Cities can be a collection of villages that reproduce the same basic virtues of community and connectedness of small towns. But there's a downside there, too. When we lived in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, we could walk to the next neighborhood over, Carroll Gardens, and find that it was a much more "intact" Italian neighborhood. It was just starting to change over to what Cobble Hill was -- a place of yuppie newcomers like us -- which was something I'd mourn. But the reason the neighborhood stayed so cohesively Italian for so long was because people there refused informally to sell their houses to anybody who wasn't already part of the community. From what some residents told us, that was a way of keeping out "undesirable" racial minorities, and, well, anybody who was Not Like Them.

Was that bad? Well, it's hard to call it good. But the truth is, no matter what culture we're talking about, preserving what is particular to it requires a significant level of exclusivity. Our culture today trains us to think of this as always and everywhere immoral and impermissible. I used to think so. But now I am completely inconsistent about these things.

For example, I completely see why it's critical for Jews to marry Jews; intermarriage is destroying the Jewish community. I find it not the least bit offensive for Jews only to want to marry Jews, for reasons of communal self-preservation. The problem comes if one is faced with the case of a Jew who is ostracized by his or her community for marrying a non-Jew. That seems quite wrong to me ... but if one is serious about preserving Jewishness, there has to be some penalty for violating the taboo. You see?

Similarly, yuppies like me would walk to Carroll Gardens and admire the cohesive sense of community and visceral community identity visible on its streets, and think, "Wow, that's neat. Wonder how they avoid the homogenization of our times?" Well, they do it by discriminating against those outside the tribe. How else could they do it? We can't have particularity without exclusivity. It's hard for we who are naturally disposed to a universalist ethic to reconcile those things, though. As the lyricist for Show of Hands puts it, "We want the meat, but not the blood."

Robert writes: I'm a gay man who grew up on a farm near a town in Texas maybe 1/5 the size of Rod's St. Francisville and who moved to San Francisco the day Harvey Milk was assassinated. Then my parents needed help and I moved back, and I've been here 12 years. I've found that if I'm not in-your-face about issues of my personal life--and I really wouldn't care for my very-Catholic (and exactly two Orthodox) straight neighbors to yell at me about their sexual orientation--I'm generally accepted. I'm known for having helped my parents during their decline, paying my bills on time, lending a helping hand when neighbors needed it. If you keep your sex life you business, my neighbors have more important things to deal with. Aside from orientation, by the way, I ascribe to a lot that's traditional in relationships. Honesty, trust, and list of priorities of which physicality is nowhere near the top. (Never has been.) There really is a web of relationships in small towns, for better or for worse.

I appreciate you saying this. Growing up in St. Francisville, most everybody knew who was gay. Still do. People seem to have developed this informal ethic of, "If you mind your business and don't make an issue of it, you do your thing and we'll do our thing, and we'll be fine."

Re: Yes, in trade for everyone ‘knowing when you’re sick and caring when you die’, as LBJ said of his hometown, everyone was aware of your private business.

This can happen in other situations too. In Akron Ohio I had a very large "friend" group, quotes around "friends" because most of these people were mere acquaintances, some of whom I didn't particularly care for. One member of the clique was extraordinaily gossipy. I once made the mistake of telling him about a problem I was having with a roommate. Less than an hour later the roommate called me (from work) to take me to task for it!

Re: You do not go to church in your part of town, so that disconnect is also relevant.

For those of us who are Orthodox, unlike Baptists and Catholics, we cannot find a church of our faith on every street corner and we are often stuck with a bit of a drive. (Happily mine is just under three miles and has never been more than ten)

I'd like to say that the farther east you go in this country, the most "closed" the communties are culturally. That sense of being "new" and taking a long time to get past it.

Not a hard and fast rule, as there's plenty of exceptions, but it's a very obvious trend. Out here, in a coastal state, I've noticed that there is a very obvious resistance to welcoming strangers... You need to prove that you're not there as one of those "activists" coming to town to wreak havoc in people's lives. There wasn't really much or any of that before, say, 20 years ago. You could join a town and be "part of it" in no time if you were open and friendly.

Today, much of the rural west has been burned by Easterners and Californians and even just big city people moving in and then finding out they're part of the political movement that destroyed all the jobs and businesses and still actively working to kill the rest.

It was many years ago when Enterprise, OR, lost the last mill, and with it died nearly all the logging industry. The resentment toward the "artsy fartsy" types who came and supported that devastation to so many people's lives is still palpable.

Worse, is that those who came in as activists arrogantly told those who were displaced and financially ruined that they were... evil and deserved what happened to them. That story is repeated across scores of towns across the rural part of the state. Now the same type of people are running DC and claiming they're the answer. Is it any wonder that there's no "unity"? Memories are much longer in rural America.