For most of the almost 53 years of my life, I have lived in the same suburban community whose borders long ago began to blur with the booming metropolis that is its neighbor.
I tell people I live in a small town even though it doesn’t reflect the stereotypical image of that virtuous American icon. 45,000 disparate souls are packed onto the tiny parcels of real estate that offer up a modest version of the American Dream. We don’t have a quaint Main Street with precious little shops and a diner. Serious crime still surprises us, but isn’t a rare occurrence. You may feel uneasy and may even be in real danger when you walk our streets after dark. Our schools are gray and deteriorating, our young people pierced, tattooed and intimidating. Guns and drugs are prevalent. Race relations are strained by those in authority who haven’t quite figured out how to adjust to the increasing diversity that now defines our community.
But despite the description to the contrary, I still maintain that I live in a small town. My definition has less to do with geography and Norman Rockwell and more to do with people and how they interact with one another. Like people in any small town, we know who has the power in the community and can love them or hate them, support or oppose them, trust or be skeptical of them at any given time. We gather in key places where news is shared, ideas are exchanged and stories are told. We adjust cautiously for newcomers and interlopers. We worry about and react to change. And we celebrate with one another, argue with one another, gossip about each other, judge one another and care about one another.
I believe we all live in small towns. Some are just bigger and have more sophisticated ways of activating the town drum. Some offer more exciting and diverse entertainment options than others. Some keep their police departments busier than others. Excitement, danger, activity and sophistication are all relative. What really matters is how we judge our neighbors when they come in at 2:00 a.m. on a weeknight.
Everything we read and see and hear today is working hard to convince us that our world is spinning out of control, that people care less and hurt more, that hope for our future is gone. And believing this, we long for that small town place and time when life was simpler and safer and people were more civil. I, for one, believe that the small town place and time we long for was probably just a sanitized version of reality even back then.
I choose to embrace my community as the small town of my life, not all that different from the small town of my parents’ and grandparents’ experience. All small towns are comprised of people living with and around each other, creating a shared community environment that supports them cooperatively, judges them arbitrarily and celebrates them collectively. How they do that and how they relate to one another is what makes life interesting and meaningful. It also provides the basis of stories from a small town – any small town.
So much happened on the world stage at the end of the last millennium. Power shifts, massive brutality, economic boom and bust, war, famine, medical breakthroughs and political scandal. The biggest news in my town? We got our own movie theatre and another McDonald’s.
I live in a small town.