Life In A Small American Town

When I moved to McMinnville, a "city" with a population of only 30,000 people, I was so excited to be moving away from all the usual gunfire, sprawling shopping malls, and the city malaise that I imagined I was surrounded by.  The last time I lived in a small town I was a disaffected depressed teen who had a posse of close friends to moan into my Earl Grey tea with.  It was a good experience for me and being forced to move away to the comparatively congested Bay Area (where I was born) I had a shockingly difficult time adjusting to the change.  I had to make friends all over again and I moved around a lot in the Bay Area.  I always dreamed of moving back to a small town where life is smaller and hopefully slower and cleaner.

I don't think I committed the crime of thinking that living in a small community is simpler, but I did expect it to be cozier and safer.  I've been thinking a lot about the three and a half years we've lived here now and how different the reality of this small town is from my expectation of it.  People ask me all the time "Why did you choose to move to McMinnville?"  That's an excellent question.  I always say that we were looking for a small town within commuting distance of Portland and McMinnville was the best one we found.  The truth is that we didn't have a lot of time to study Oregon and figure out where we'd fit in best and enjoy life the most.

One of the things people told me most often as a fresh faced new-comer is that McMinnville is a very cliquish place.  It seemed overall so friendly I didn't completely believe it.  I didn't have trouble meeting friendly people.  However, it's one thing to say hello to people on the street or to be a casual person invited to their "public" parties (the ones they invite everyone to) but finding people with whom you can make a deep and lasting friendship has proved to be much more challenging and complicated.  I'm not the only in-comer who has observed this difficulty. 

I always loved those shows on television about small towns where everyone knows each other and is in each other's business like "Northern Exposure".  It seemed that you would be bound to fit in because eventually everyone would have to accept you.  What a little romance that is!  The reality is a shadow of that intimacy.  Yes, in a small town it is nearly impossible to truly ignore people you don't like, but that doesn't mean that eventually everyone will be friends. 

I have made quite a few enemies here in my cozy sweet little town.  I don't think I've ever been one to deny my culpability when things have gone wrong between myself and others.  After the most recent dust up, which resulted in a shiny new enemy, I have spent a lot of time thinking about small town life in a different light than I used to.  I've been thinking about how I fit in, or don't.  About how many people I had thought I would become good friends with that have turned out to be surface acquaintances.  The people who might have let me into their lives while I was a retail store owner were definitely less inviting once I was just an unemployed depressed nobody.  It isn't that I was ever exactly snubbed but that the exchanges became less warm and I could feel barriers drawn where they hadn't been before.  Which would have been devastating if I had really wanted to be let into their private circles.

I didn't think of small towns as having such definite social levels- but why not?  People are people no matter whether they live in small tribes or giant masses.  Social structure is the silent divider whether you have a monarchy or not.  It's human nature.

I don't feel any resentment.  Only curiosity.  It's funny now when I'm invited to something only because it's necessary in order to be politic and I know it but I'm not sure if the people doing the politically right move in inviting me know that I know why I am being included. 

I have been excluded from quite a few social circles and sometimes it's hurt to know that I was only partly let in but never fully included, but now that I have pretty much had myself ejected from every possible established clique here in McMinnville what I find is that my close friends, the ones who are happy to see me and my family any time we want to drop in, those who love us and enjoy us in all our freakitude, are mostly outsiders like ourselves.  This is always how it shakes down in my life.  I belong with the outsiders, the ones that don't fit in anywhere else.  Like in High School when I didn't fit in with the punks because I wasn't rough and mean and angry enough; I didn't fit in with the death rockers because I was too theatrical and in spite of all the black I was still too colorful; I didn't fit in with the geeks because I wasn't smart enough; I didn't fit in with anyone but a strange band of other people who defied classification.

This sleepy little town that all but closes up on Sundays so everyone can attend church (!!) put a spell on me- it's the only rational explanation for why I was wanting so much to fit in with the wrong groups of people. 

I am so much happier and less lonely now that I am back to my comfortable little niche in society; being friendly with almost everyone in town (because I'm pretty gregarious) but close to very few people.  The people I am close to are dear and wonderful friends who are also misfits in their own ways.  What most of my friends and I have in common is:  we're transplants from more cosmopolitan cities.  We aren't church goers.  We have two or fewer children.  We are liberal both socially and politically.  We are not particularly tolerant of religious evangelism and we are ardently pro-choice and supporters of civil rights for gay Americans.  We like casual drop ins from each other and love talking about music and philosophy while drinking lots of beer and eating the best food on earth.

I suppose I could always move if I wanted to.  If I felt too unwelcome.  But for all the things I don't like about this town, there are twice as many things I love about it.  It's going to change a lot over the next twenty years.  There will be a lot more people like me and my misfit friends settling in.  It will become more sophisticated.  It will become less poor.  It will grow.  It will become more diverse culturally.  How do I know all this?  Because that's the kind of thing that happens to cute towns located within commuting distance of hip cities like Portland. 

I'm going to be here to watch it change. 

I'm going to be able to tell stories about how it used to be back when we first came here in the early spring of '06 because I don't plan on moving even if I end up so unpopular I have to wear a scarlet letter "F" on my coat to warn everyone of my status as "FREAK". 

I am what I am.

And I live in a small American town called McMinnville.