Small
Town
Feb
16 2022
The
world becomes smaller these days.
I
don't mean faster planes
and
out of season fruit
and
the world wide web.
I
mean for me
as
time passes
and
my circle imperceptibly shrinks.
I
grew up in a small town
and
all I could think of then
was
getting out;
big
city
big
ambition
big
plans.
But
now, this small sleepy place
suits
me fine.
The
slow pace, and quaint downtown.
The
lack of rush hour traffic,
the
strangers who wave
just
because.
And
the local cafe
where
the cooking is plain
and
you can order coffee black;
no
fancy Italian name
always
a bottomless cup.
I
could sit all day, chewing the fat
nodding
at folks as they pass.
The
headline
in
the local paper
is
about the high school team
who
let victory slip through their hands.
Second
place, not bad;
a
pretty good finish, in fact.
The
winner always leaves
and
rarely comes back.
The
runner-up stays
but
seems happier for it;
content
with
a steady job
at
the hardware store,
a
passable score in golf,
and
the girl next door
sleeping
at his side
in
their queen-size bed.
My thanks to Garrison Keillor, whose
piece today inspired this poem. Here it is:
The little-known
benefits of raw oysters perhaps
I took up eating oysters on the half
shell back in my late twenties, as a token of eastern sophistication.
I was in New York and my editor took me to lunch and ordered a dozen
and asked if I’d like some. “Of course,” I said, not wanting to
seem provincial, and ate three, which resembled phlegm but with
horseradish were palatable and went down easily, no chewing required.
Last
week, passing through the lovely town of Easton, Maryland, across
Chesapeake Bay from Baltimore, I enjoyed six Chesapeake oysters,
which were larger, meatier, than the ones in New York fifty years ago
and a man sitting next to me at the bar asked how they were —
“They’re very good, they must be wild,” I said — and he said,
“You’re from Minnesota, aren’t you.” I said yes. I did not
say, “But I live in New York.” It doesn’t matter where you
live, you’re still from where you’re from. Provincial is baked
into my blood and I can’t escape it by wearing a nice suit or
eating seafood, I’m still from the land of the Spam sandwich.
The gentleman said he’d driven
through Minnesota once when he was twenty. Under the influence of
reading Jack Kerouac, he’d driven from his home in Maine to Oregon
and in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, he had pitched his tent in the
cemetery and spent a peaceful night there.
“I used to live not far from
there, in Freeport, in a rented farmhouse,” I said. He had loved
Kerouac’s On The Road and started writing poetry in a flowing
lowercase unpunctuated run-on style and spent some time in Oregon
considering a Beat life but returned east to college and wound up a
pediatrician. He loved Kerouac but he did not admire the heedless
Beat lifestyle that wrecked the lives of so many and he was happy in
medicine though he still enjoyed camping. He said, “I notice the
defibrillator in your chest. Do you mind?” and he reached over and
put his hand on it. He said, “Do you ever feel it kick in?” I
shook my head. “Then you’re in a good shape,” he said.
It was a bonus, to get a
professional opinion along with the oysters, and also to meet a man
who confessed to being happy about his life. Kerouac should’ve met
him, a man who enjoyed rambunctious prose but dedicated himself to a
highly disciplined career in science. He asked what I did, I said,
“I’m retired.” No point in getting into all that. I too am a
happy man, though in Minnesota I was brought up to conceal pleasure
lest it make the less fortunate feel bad. But it was a very happy day
in Easton. A self-righteous Democrat finds it hard to say that — I
should be bemoaning something — but I felt utterly happy.
I could imagine living in this town
of 16,000. I had grown up in a town that size and escaped from it by
eating those New York oysters but now it appealed to me. The pandemic
has made our lives smaller anyway. I walked around the downtown of
elegant old brick buildings and went to a show at the old Avalon
Theatre at which the audience was in a jolly mood and sang the
national anthem and on the line, “Oh say does that star-spangled
banner yet wave,” they shouted the “Oh.” The hotel bed was
comfortable, I had a big breakfast.
The next morning I was at Union
Station in Washington to catch a train to New York and stepped onto a
Down escalator and got myself and a suitcase aboard but my briefcase
stayed behind and I looked back and saw it getting smaller and tried
to run up the descending steps and made no progress but the briefcase
contained my laptop with a good deal of work in the hard drive and I
tried to climb faster and couldn’t, while toting the suitcase, and
finally, not wanting to have a heart attack and die, I descended and
I saw three young women laughing, sitting at a table drinking coffee,
with two young children who were laughing too. They were laughing at
me and now I could imagine how it looked, a scene from a Buster
Keaton movie, man versus machine, and it pleased me, my debut in
slapstick comedy, and I recovered the briefcase, and headed for home,
a happy man, and if that’s what Chesapeake Bay oysters can do for
you, then I hope to make them part of my daily diet.
