I didn't hardly know anyone from a small town (less than 10,000 people or so) until I came to college. Until I met Mike. Really--I lived in the suburbs of large cities or college towns (Columbia, Missouri is not a small town) and everyone I knew lived there, too. My great-grandmother might count--she was from DeSoto, Missouri--but frankly, I didn't really know her. My grandmother (her daughter-in-law) was from Maries County, Missouri, and then later moved to Marshall. So I suppose she was my only connection to small town life.
But by the time I knew my grandmother (Edith) or great-grandmother (Emma), they lived in St. Louis. My mom is from South County, my dad from Overland. His mother rode the streetcar to high school. His dad grew up within walking distance of where I'm sitting right now. All my high school friends were suburban or city dwellers; every boyfriend, every teacher, every girl I bummed a ride off to get home from my city high school to my suburban home.
When I was assigned to Marguerite Hall, 4th floor, Mike was the freshman adviser. He wrote me a letter (he wrote all the incoming freshmen letters). I had to find Cairo on a map. A speck. In contrast, my roommate was from Detroit.
I got to school, met Mike and his roommate Eric (Memphis), friends Carlos (Crestwood), Vanessa (Palm Beach), Elliot (suburban Chicago). Later I met Katy and Monica, from central Illinois, and Traci from Mexico, Missouri, but overall, we were all from the same place. Just different zip codes.
Mike didn't seem any different for growing up in a small town--he spent most of high school on the road to Belleville to attend CYO events. The first time I visited, just a month after we started dating, wasn't the eye-opening experience I thought it would be. It had to grow on me over time.
Mary ("the other mary") once said that meeting people's parents often explained things about them. Meeting my parents, for instance, or Elliot's. But meeting Mike's parents explained nothing. Going to see where he was from just made him all the more mystifying. She says this while laughing and sometimes giving a dead-on impression of my father-in-law's accent. And while this is all true, I still find myself confronted by the intricacies of small town, rural, life. And how much I just don't get it even after all this time.
Over on one of my other blogs, Most Nigh to Tears and Memory, I used to write about a song a day for a year. It's done now, but I still think about it a lot and how music is associated with times and seasons and people in my life. One of my entries was about the song "Ode to Billie Joe" and how, after all these years, I was finally grasping the difference between small town Mike and big city Bridgett.
....my family is a JD Salinger tragedy, not a Flannery O'Connor moment of tragic grace. Snappy dialogue peppered with profanity, lamentations over whiskey sours, a relationship goes bad and we just smoke more cigarettes in our pedal pushers sitting on the apartment balcony. Get rip-snortin drunk while playing pool and an uncle makes a pass at you. I'm not saying it's better. Just a different set of reference points.
The family I married into is not this way. I have not a single regret--the love story of Mike and Bridgett centers around the fact that his family didn't make me crazy. They are smart faithful people. They would do anything for me and Mike and my girls. But they are a southern family in a southern town. It might snow there but there are subtleties to conversation, relationships, gender issues, education, and religion that I'm only just now starting to scratch the surface and understand.
Imagine Boo Boo Glass walking into Scout Finch's house and having dinner on a Sunday afternoon. Repeat for 11 years and she still doesn't get it.
It can't be that all small towns are Cairo, of course. A small town in northern Michigan would probably have a very different feel. Central California. West Texas. But I think I would fail to "get it" in the very same way.
It will always be a second language for me.
5 comments:
My parents both come from very small towns. I feel pretty comfortable "speaking" both languages. My husband (born and bred in STL), though, just can not get it and feels completely lost whenever we visit my grandparents. It really is almost something you have to grow up with to really understand all the little nuances.
I actually wonder if it is the small town thing, or whether it's just getting to know another family in the most intimate way. My sister-in-law is from Asia, and the things she finds odd in our husbands' family she will often put down to a "NZ" thing (small country syndrome). But the truth is that she and I often have more in common, and it's simply a strange family language/culture that we have both entered.
There is something about small Southern towns that's hard to quantify. I grew up suburban (if you want to consider Little Rock a City) & moved to a small town as a teen. Normal teen awkwardness was one thing, but everything in the small town was different in ways I still can't describe. The things I liked--being able to walk everywhere, knowing most people by sight and habit, the sense of community borne of extreme locality--I've found in City neighborhood. And mostly, the things I can't describe aren't here. Mostly.
I was really struck by this statement: "His dad grew up within walking distance of where I'm sitting right now."
That strikes me as extraordinary in the modern context, where children move away from home to pursue an education and a job. Of my parents' six kids, only two of us remained in our home town (although five out of six remained in Ontario). I think that sort of mobility is the rule rather than the exception here in Canada. To think that you're still so close to your grandfather's home really surprises me.
But I can relate to the rest of your post. I discovered what an urban person I am when I pastored a church in a community of approximately 5,500 people. Not such a small town, I suppose, but much smaller than Toronto, where I had lived for the previous six years. Significantly smaller even by comparison to my home town, which had a population of about 60,000 people. And the church mostly consisted of farmers, not town-dwellers.
Here's one of the memories that will stay with me forever. As background, I need to tell you that there was only one black family in town — everyone else was white. (The one black family was the pastor of the Baptist church and his family; I always thought it demonstrated how progressive those Baptists were.)
One day, one of my elders commented on how many ethnic people lived in town. I looked at him in puzzlement; meanwhile, it was clear that the other elder agreed completely.
"What ethnic people?" I asked — genuinely baffled.
"Just drive down the road and look at the mailboxes," was the answer. "All of the names are Dutch."
I'm not claiming to be superior because I'm more cosmopolitan than those folks were. I'm just saying, we were coming from two completely different points of reference.
I experienced culture shock when I moved there, which came as a complete surprise. And we never learned to understand each other — not really.
It is especially strange for me, I think, because he'd moved north by the time I was born, and then of course I lived around the country. I happened to settle here, eerily close. My parents live on the next block, too, which seems even more strange when you consider they were gone for 20 years from St. Louis.
I like the dutch story. That's funny.
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