Everyone Needs a Small Town.

 

Everyone needs a Marshalltown, Iowa; a Zap, North Dakota; or a Swink, Colorado.  A small-town place where one can sit quietly and invite “a green thought in a green shade.”

It doesn’t matter if you are born into such a setting, or come to it later in life.  The important thing is to recognize it and grab hold of it while you can, while the blood runs red and the mind still fights its own discontent.

We joke about the small town, quoting to each other Fred Allen’s story of the seaside village that was so mundane the tide went out one day – and never came back.  New York and Chicago and Los Angeles are crammed chock-a-block with people who have ‘escaped’ from America’s small towns.  Usually to find work and to lose heart.

Small towns can be suffocating, with their blindered zeitgeist.  But they are also liberating, with an anomalous peace that roots deep.

I have lived in several small towns over the course of forty years; towns where the traffic lights simultaneously blink yellow all night long, where mail only comes to post office boxes,  where locks on doors are rusted open from disuse, where grain elevators are the tallest buildings not only in town but in the whole county. 

In these towns all the church bells ring at noon on Good Friday, and business closes up.   Streams of children walk to school, and walk home again for lunch.  Old men sit in the VFW, watching their beer grow warm and flat, remembering the September weather in Inchon. Though the children still frolic, the adults have learned not to bustle, but to treat sidewalks like minefields, stopping frequently to examine the terrain.

 There are benches in the town square, where I have sat many a drowsy summer afternoon or tangy fall morning to watch the same people go to the same places.  This is not monotony.  It is purpose and instinct.  The heavy hardware store door needs oiling.  But I like to hear it clear its raspy throat.  The gazebo needs painting. Chipmunks have set up a commune underneath it and hold comic battles with the squirrels to defend it.  I don’t think great thoughts while sitting on a park bench in a small town in the middle of Iowa, but I don’t think bad thoughts, either.  On such benches, on such days as I could filch from work, I have thought about how much I would like to see a barn owl or recall the milkweed silk and the cottonwood fluff piling up in the dry gutters on a breezy day.  I have relived the small moments that echo so momentously in my life – the day I was baptized, as an adult, into a new church, and the night I met a Thai woman during Songkran, and what came of  those events.

The big city will feed you life, almost intravenously; in a small town you chew over the cud of your existence again and again.  It takes courage and tenacity to live in a small town and not go stir crazy.  To live in a big city all it takes is money, or something to counterfeit it.

We should all have a Marshalltown we can go to when things are too noisy, too intense, and too unstable.  I hope I’ll meet you there some day, on a park bench over by the courthouse.