Maybe like me, you grew up in a small hometown that now looks like Brigadoon, coming back to life every hundred years or so, but otherwise somehow remains the same, the same, the same: different faces, different names, but the familiar ‘types’ still exist back home.
My hometown was a village of 600 souls. It is still at 600 from lack of opportunity, lack of land, but also and mostly, because the people there like it that way. Maybe your hometown, or your neighborhood, or your block, or your road, too.
So here’s some news from the newspaper back to home this week…
The carrot crop came in. That was tasty, mmm carrots straight out of good black dirt. But then came extraordinary rains in the upper farmlands. How the crops will fare after this week’s hail storm remains to be seen. And the kids are having festivals and preparing their 4-H projects for the last leg before the State Fair. And others have summer jobs mowing and picking & packing. And some are just cruising the roads looking for all the good-looking anything.
And, Well okay, it is hard to write headlines sometimes. In the newspaper in the next town over from our hometown, there was this headline “Multiple Semi Crash…” It doesn’t mean there was a crash, ‘kinda-sorta.’ It means several 18 wheelers ran into each other on the overland highway.
Too it is reported that there was the early morning supermarket robbery wherein liquor and goods such as baby diapers were hijacked. Turns out it was a scheme by a mini-mart on the other side of town to stock their own shelves for free. Booty recovered.
Then, honest, a man called a clerk of a small sewing store, said he was from the water dept saying there was a leak, that the clerk needed to go into bathroom and flush toilet several times to help pinpoint the leak. She did. Several times. Came out. Cash drawer was open. And empty. Headline was: “Bogus Phone Call Leads to Emptied Toilet, Cash Register.”
In the “Pets for Sale” classifieds, we find that we can impress and possibly terrorize our neighbors by purchasing “Nigerian Dwarf Dairy Goats Registered Does, Bucks, & Wethers. Make Great Pets! $100 & up.”
In other classifieds,
— we also are offered a “1969 Pontiac GTO rear seat, 2 piece, very good condition, $99” in case we might have the other half of this model stowed away somewhere, like maybe in one of the barns or something.
–And we can also buy “all metal bed springs approximately 52″x73″, FREE…” in case, you know, you want to make a little—or a lot of– night music.
–And lastly, my favorite in these inflationary times, a heck of a deal: “10 cent bottle Coke machine for sale: $550.”
And, this hometown somewhat suspended like some ancient creature in amber, it is also the place where every day the old street corner guys decide the affairs of the world and how it oughta be…if only they were in charge. Every day they decide. And the world is ok for a few minutes. And in the morning, the world has all come undone again. Needs to be put back together. The old guys have their work cut out for them every day. And they go to this weighted work with pride and relish. They know a few things, they say. And that’s news too… that as best they can, these old warriors keep mending up the world that came undone in the middle of the night.
And the obits are filled mostly with the very, very elderly who have flown from this world, most of them born in the early 1910s forward to 1925 or so. This week it was old men whose obituaries say they worked at such and such a plant or factory for 45 years. Their names are Dwight, Harold, John, Jim, Mike, Joe, Lester, Delmar. The old women are named Opal and Alice and Mary and Mavis. Many of the elder men and women who passed this week left five and eight living daughters and sons, dozens of grandchildren, dozens of great grandchildren. Lest any one be left out, also named in the obits are plenty of in-laws, step-family members, and what in our hometown are called ‘special friends,’ which means someone who has been your fellow traveler for a lifetime.
That’s the news from home for now. No matter where we come from, in one way or another, this is our hometown.