Small Town - Feb 16 2022

 

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.