The small town we made up
I did part of my growing up in a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri. The parents of most of my high school friends were immigrants who had come to Kansas City from Bluejacket, Oklahoma; Coffey, Missouri; Calico Rock, Arkansas, and a hundred other angle-parking-on-Main-Street towns in the middle of the country.
Their parents had "country" accents, but they worked in the auto plant, and if they grew a nostalgic patch of okra out by the back fence, they did their grocery shopping in a supermarket. Isn't that why they'd come to Kansas City, for an auto plant job and a two-bedroom ranch house with central heat and a supermarket and, by the '70s, the mall?
Behind them they left dying little towns that had lost half their population since 1920, high schools with graduating classes of 17. Some of those towns are gone now, and some have shrunk to double-digit populations, every store on main street abandoned, the high school closed.
Some of my friends' fathers and mothers remembered picking cotton by hand, plowing behind a mule in the 1940s, summers without shoes, no electricity and going "to town" on a Saturday to watch other country people who'd come to town.
They fled from it all, eyes bright for movie theaters and a steel mill paycheck.
Once or twice a year, they took my friends back to that backward little town to spend time with Meemaw and look at growing corn or fields of brown stubble left behind by the combines. In general, my friends hated those trips.
"There's nothing to do there," they'd tell me when they came back, just before we headed to the mall.
Despite the emptying out of small towns across the country, there is in many of us some perfect dream of small-town life, some nostalgia for what we never knew but what is waiting for us if only we'll sell our suburban two-story and move into a tin-roof shotgun house on the outskirts of a town of 300 where we will reclaim the heritage of all Americans, which by now is some hayseed caricature of rural white people, shellacked over with the flag, and a small white church and guns, plenty of guns.
It's part of that grand picture of America in which honorable Italians still run some sanitized version of organized crime, there are no Black people in country towns and Rocky Balboa is the heavyweight champion, endlessly knocking out cocky Black challengers, but only after losing the first 14 rounds of the fight.
Once we move to the small town of our fantasies, we'll live "off the grid." In fact, we use our smartphones to tell our Facebook friends just how much we want to live off the grid.
There are no meth addicts in this imagined rural America, no pill heads, no welfare recipients, no crime, no gay people, nothing but a little bit of old man Brown's moonshine a-cookin' in a still out behind the barn, and Andy and Opie.
We don't want to live in rural America, but we want to want to live in rural America, or at least we want to know it's still there for us, frozen in 1956, and waiting for us to come home.
My wife's cat is an entitled, pudgy calico named Maggie. Sometimes, she sits in the dining room window and watches the squirrels in a nearby tree. If the squirrels come close enough, she gets up on her hind legs and scratches the hard surface of the window glass.
She doesn't want to hunt. She's never hunted in her life, and the free life of the feral cat would kill her in a year. What she wants is to eat her tuna and mackerel feast from a bowl with green flowers in the side, and sleep in a pink, fuzzy bed bought just for her.
She's a soft cat, but she imagines the lion's life she's never known.
© Creators, 2023