I’ve lived all over the United States, on both coasts and in the South and the Upper Midwest. I’ve lived in large cities and their suburbs, in a small city for eight years and now, for the past seventeen years, in a small town of 3000 people. At the age of thirty-three, after all this moving around, I chose a small town with the intent to put down deep roots and never move again.
I’d never before lived in a small town and, to some extent, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Previously I’d always been able to avoid the people who weren’t “like me” –either by design or because our paths had no reason to cross. In suburbs people hardly see their neighbors—other than kids who go outside to play and meet other kids. In cities you find “your people” by virtue of your interests or your workplace or your religion or your political affiliation. And then you stick with these people by seeing them on a regular basis. There’s not a whole lot of reason to get to know people you haven’t selected.
Small towns are different this way. My own town has two main cross-streets on which all business takes place. You see the same people over and over just because the pond is small. Your paths cross because your kids are in the same grade at school, or on the same sports team. Or you serve on a board or committee together—because the same ten people volunteer for things over and over again. And you may or may not have anything in common other than random circumstance. There are no schools to choose between—not without paying over 10K a year to go to another town—so your kids are all thrown together in small classrooms. And when you live on the same dirt road, chances are good you’ll help pull one another out of a ditch some day. But these are tiny interactions, requiring little more than a bit of pleasant small talk.
Then the sixth grade class needs to raise money for their end-of-year trip and suddenly you find yourself organizing a fundraiser with a woman you know to have radically different politics from your own, who you know you’d disagree with on most anything about how to run the country. And when you find yourself standing in front of a hot dog machine at a basketball tournament, you find other things to talk about. You make polite inquiries about her mother’s health, or whether she plants a garden. And you try to be friendly and cooperative about who will wash out the hot dog machine when the tournament is finished. You’re both fully aware of all you’re not talking about, and that’s alright. It’s a tacit agreement, predicated on the fact that a raging argument isn’t something you want. How will that help the sixth grade raise money?
But you’re curious about this woman. How does someone who seems so “normal” vote for that monster [fill in the blank with the name of any politician you distrust.] How can she think that’s a good idea? And you wonder what she’s thinking about you. Does she think you’re a tax-and-spend evil liberal who’s out to see her living on the street because the taxes have gotten too high??
And in truth, our taxes ARE too high—at least our property taxes in this small town. We can hardly afford them, and my husband and both work and have excess education. How do people who make close to minimum wage ever pay their taxes? It worries me. Certainly all the retirees on fixed incomes come out to vote ‘no’ to every single new expenditure. And can you blame them?
So when I first served on a board with someone I’ll call Judith, a woman known to be conservative and opposed to most new taxes, I was prepared to dislike her. I thought she’d be humorless and mean. And sometimes she was. But mostly she wasn’t. Mostly she was nice and brought snacks and made the same kind of little jokes that we women all make—about how dirty our houses are and how we’ll never get organized. (Despite that I suspected her house was immaculate and she was more organized than most anyone I’d ever met—with every bit of school board paperwork neatly three-hole-punched and put in a designated section of a big binder!)
Anyhow, I was expecting to disagree with Judith on most every issue, and it didn’t turn out that way at all. When it came to spending, she just wanted accountability—and I was on board with that. Why shouldn’t money spent on something have a metric to show efficiency? It’s not hard to agree we don’t want to waste money.
And there were plenty of other issues on which Judith and I were in complete agreement. And where we didn’t agree, it was civil and respectful. We would come down on different sides of a vote and still make pleasant small talk after the meeting.
I came to respect her as a person, which continued to surprise me over the four years we served together. I wouldn’t call us friends exactly, but I think we shared a mutual regard that persists to this day, six or so years later, where we make small talk at ball games and nod with real smiles when our paths cross. If and when we ever come back to working together, I’m certain it would be a pleasure to us both.
Me and a real Republican??! How did that happen? It was inconceivable in my college days. I was terrified of Republicans. Never mind that I was terrified of most everyone else who seemed “other”—who didn’t line up along the comfortable and familiar liberal party lines that “we” all agreed were the “right way.”
I still don’t pretend to understand Judith’s politics, but the amount that I liked and respected her changed me in a profound way. It made me stop using short-cuts to decide who I liked and wanted to know. It made me realize that I could connect to someone for reasons that had nothing to do with how we vote. Which isn’t to say that I’m as comfortable at the local American Legion hall as I am at the hippy food co-op, where I know I vote the same way as 99.9% of others, but only that I don’t judge that way any longer.
Now I wait. I give people a chance to prove who they are separate from how they vote. And I try to stay open-minded even when it’s hard.
And this is character, right?
I’m not sure I would have got here without this terrifically small pond to force me to it.
My small town has helped my own character, and as a side benefit it’s given me a host of characters to study and dissect and sometimes laugh about . . . But always with a dose of sympathy and tolerance because I could well find myself stuck in a ditch with that person next winter.
