When I first moved to from Lawrenceville, GA (suburb of Atlanta and home of the Gwinett Braves) to Clarksdale, MS (suburb of nowhere, home of the Delta Blues Museum: what a level of excitement for a 12-year-old who’d never even heard of Lucille) I basically thought I’d descended to the first circle of pre-teen hell, mourning my separation from movie theaters and shopping malls.1
Although it was in my first small-town experience that I learned valuable lessons like what it feels like to be a minority, how to properly cross the street,2 and Native American pronunciation, it was not those things that I began to appreciate while I was there. Those were ones like Freedom, Self-confidence, and how to properly toilet-paper someone’s house.
On days when I had marching band practice, I would walk the two blocks from Oakhurst Junior High to the downtown storefront of the J.C. Penny Co, Inc. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but I was a pre-teen and I was entrusted with transporting myself from one place to another. Plus, I got to leave school in a slightly cooler fashion than hopping in my mom’s minivan. It also necessitated the learning of the second of the aforementioned then-unappreciated lessons.
I’d walk past Marty’s barber shop and wave to the grandfatherly man, sometimes armed with scissors, sometimes fast asleep in his own chair. Once in a while this guy that worked for my dad and went to the high school that shared my junior high’s campus would pick me up on the bridge over the Sunflower River. I’d feel even cooler for the 45-second ride, listening to Eminem and wondering was ‘cid was.
Now granted, I was never a fan of Clarksdale (although I’m sure this had as much to do with when in my life I moved there as anything else), but that has made me appreciate Elizabeth City even more. I’m surprised to realize even as I write this that in 2000 (the year I moved from the Delta to the Albemarle) that Elizabeth City had 3,000 less people than my former town of residence. But it had a movie theater with two screens and a shopping mall, and that was quite enough for me.
But it retained the small-town feel. I knew pretty much everyone in my graduating class, and a good chunk of my entire high school. And although I sometimes wish I’d learned to drive in a bigger place so that I’d be a more aggressive driver, I like the fact that rolling down Southern Avenue, Ehringhaus Street, Halstead Boulevard, or even Highway 17, I can’t help but pass someone I know. In one single day last week, I saw, waved to, or phoned after passing Jerry, Billy, Linda, Ginny, Madeline, two different Mrs. Julies, and my mom, and all I did was go from home to the bank.
Multiply that effect at least by two if I so much as take a walk down Water or Main Street. Dozens of people tell me the next day that they saw me from their car or office or Rachel’s Place (where Johnny still knows what to bring me for breakfast without so much as a word).
And forget the fact that people know me. I (try not to, but) can drop my dad’s name anywhere in Pasquotank County and people who don’t know me instantly love me because they love him and because they know who he is.4 Some people wouldn’t appreciate that, but in my experience, it’s not bad for a cop, FedEx driver, or random elderly lady at somebody else’s church to say “Hey, I know someone named ‘Peck’…”
Growing up in a small town tends to serve you well other places in the world, too. Add in being southern, and stopping on the sidewalk to chat with someone about their family, despite being 20 minutes late and still 4 blocks away doesn’t seem all that foreign, even on another continent. Living in a big city with easily defined neighborhoods isn’t a big adjustment either when you treat the couple square miles around you like a small town that’s just really close to all the other small towns around you.
I tend to think that personal relationships of all kinds benefit from their being born in a small town. Seeing the same people everywhere has pros and cons, but makes for closer relationships with those people. And that doesn’t necessarily impede branching out into new friendships either. I’m used to always being able to strike up a conversation with anyone. This is because I can invariably ask “who’s that” and get anyone’s life story around a place like this. Though I don’t always do that (probably because I know I always can later), it makes for a habit of just being friendly.
Something I learned in another big town was that no matter where you are, you’re going to say “there’s nothing to do in this place,”5 but the fact that I have said that in a city with 10 times the population and 14 times the area of this one sort of takes the sting away from the statement, and negates really the only disadvantage I see to being outside what we sometimes so wistfully think of here as “civilization.”
If the above paragraph sentence is any indication, then maybe going to school here had its effects on me. And I certainly know more country music than I’d care to know and more obscure history than I’d care to admit because of my two small-town stints. But I like the fact that the whole town can be like Cheers sometimes, that six days a week anyone who knows me knows where to find me, and that a movie ticket is cheaper here than it is in a developing nation (despite the need for a baseball cap).6
1Lydia is scoffing at this notion as she reads this post, but shopping malls do include book stores.
2Though I’d learned this already at a much earlier age, this was first of three times I would re-learn this important skill thanks to both witnessing someone being hit by a car and being (somewhat) hit by a car myself in the vicinity of Oakhurst Junior High.
3With, at the time, some semblance of a bookstore.
4Though I tend to have to say “I know… I look like my mom,” before they believe me.
5That’s never true if there are people around.
6Oh yeah, and discovering freedom, tight friendships, and the subtleties of race, street-crossing, and politics in a small place aren’t so bad either.
