My best friend refuses to ever slumber in her Texas hometown again — except for the occasional visits to see her 80-something-year-old mom. She prefers the freedom and anonymity that crowded SoCal gives her. Too many people to pay much mind to you, save car honks when a light turns green or the occasional finger wave from a road rage-weary driver.
In her hometown, not far from Bryan Texas (a town where I spent a couple of years as a tweener while Pop went to Texas A&M for the Air Force), folks have known her since she was in diapers or donned her first pair of shoes in time for school. And they expect that she’ll stay in her social place — both on account of her race and gender — or they’ll help her to remember that place.
If you get too far out of line, get too uppity, expect to rise too high, those ol’ boys and girls are none to happy to show a bit of hospitality as they show you back to your place in the social strata.
She’s not a fan. And prefers dealing with flashing tail lights and 60-mile one-way commutes to dirt roads and the social humidity that hovers in her hometown.
Kathleen Norris, in her must-read book, “Dakota,” writes about the social epicenter of small town life: An endless party train, where some folks toil on a party treadmill that serves to both starve off boredom and knit the partygoers into a social web — one that can be nearly impossible to escape. Norris, famed for her poetry and spiritual writings, noted how oppressive those good ol’ boy & girl networks can become and how easy it is to get sucked into them, which not only eats up precious time, but firmly plants you into your place in the social strata. (Norris writes about the rumors that circulated in her town concerning her fidelity to her late husband. Sexuality seems a common theme.)
Getting off and away from the treadmill is vital — as Norris writes. It gives you time, space, freedom and fortifies a dignified sense of self. It also snatches away power and control from the social good ol boy & girl network, a group that has definite ideas of how one should behave in the realm of social order as the good ol folks would like it. And, I think, time and space, slowing down and getting off of a treadmill that’s going nowhere fast, is a necessity that you have take. No one’s going to give it to you.
Something to learn on both fronts, methinks.
-Christy
Filed under: Butterflies, Feminism, conversation, ethics | Tagged: Dakota, freedom, Good ol boy networks, Good Ol Boys, Good Ol Girls, Kathleen Norris, small towns
