When my father moved the family from beautiful eccentric Natchez, Mississippi, to the teeny dull Halstead, Kansas, when I was 12, I was devastated. Halstead had about 2,000 people in it, and everyone knew everyone. I hated that. There was no anonymity. Anything you did was watched and talked about.
I missed the greenery of the South. Kansas was so flat and the landscape was boring -- just pale brown with wheat. I was interested, though, in how people from Kansas hated the landscape of the South -- too claustrophobic, too many plants and trees -- you couldn't see for miles like you could in the Midwest.
So I guess it's whatever you grow up with that you love the best. But I thought of Halstead last night as I was finishing up Main Street by Sinclair Lewis. Of small towns, he wrote:
The tradition, repeated in scores of magazines every month, is that the American village remains the one sure abode of friendship, honesty, and clean sweet marriageable girls. Therefore all men who succeed in painting in Paris or in finance in New York at last become weary of smart women, return to their native towns, assert that cities are vicious, marry their childhood sweethearts, and presumably, joyously abide in those towns until death....
It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment...the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery of self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God.
Saturday, 31 May 2008
Small-town living
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11 comments:
Of course, a small town doesn't have to be like Halstead (which is actually a city!), with 2000 inhabitants. The St. Louis metro area, for example, has 2.8m people.
oooh, cold!
I confess that I far prefer little intimate towns (not Kansas though, ugh) and hamlets to big cities. I'd love to live in a tiny place like the Irish village in "Waking Ned Divine"---what was the population of Tullymore, like, 45 people? How lovely to bike everywhere (oops, sorry Katie Lee!) and have chickens pecking in the rear garden...as far as eveyone knowing one's business, ah me, I'm afraid I lead such a blameless life that my "business" is an open book...must do something about that...
In a small town, no one has a blameless life. They would pin something on you, for sure! Even if it is they don't like the way you brought up your children, or your political views are wrong, your drawers are messy, etc.
which drawers are you speaking of, Elizabeth?? ;-)
I wondered the same thing! But surely, in whatever sized town she finds herself, our Blog Damozel changes her drawers daily?:):)
That's so gross. You know perfectly well that I mean the drawers in a bedroom. My grandmother always had perfectly arranged drawers and my mother admired them and it was some sort of thing that you were supposed to have neat drawers but mine have stuff from the 1850s in them, they are so disorganized.
My drawers (both furniture and undergarments) stay relatively nice, but we're all trumped by my friend Lisa Markham, who---now get this---IRONS AND FOLDS her husband's tidy-whities! I thought she was lying when she claimed to do this, but once when I was at her house she showed me---I just stood there in silent awe, looking at those flawless stacks of undershirts and unmentionables. If my darling husband ever asked me to do such a thing, I'd of course comply like a good wife, but I'd stipulate that he'd have to be wearing 'em while I ironed 'em...
If that were me, I would be ashamed to admit it.
I wish I had a wife like that. Wouldn't it be nice to be taken care of domestically for a bit? Once I went to France with BWJ and she would make sandwiches for us when we came home from the beach and I thought it was one of the nicest things ever to have someone who anticipated our hunger and made sandwiches. I hadn't had that sort of experience since I'd become a mother.
That was such a fun time, in the south of France! I'd gladly make sandwiches again, to be there by that pool with the Mediterranean beach just steps away...having cool gin/tonics with our hosts on the terrace...shopping in the cute little town of Hyeres...I loved it.
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