City versus Country

[fabrisse]

I had the weirdest moment of revelation tonight. I've always been a city kid.

Both my parents were country kids. A quick example from Mom's life was the rattlesnake that came into the living room to get cool. My Dad had no electricity until he was 15. The town he grew up in still didn't have electricity: they moved.

Part of their urge to make a better life for the kids was making certain that we knew how to behave in restaurants, that we weren't afraid to try new things, and that we were aware of other religions.

Tonight, a friend of my mother's was amazed at having seen her first Orthodox Jew. I've mentioned before that they lived in a frum neighborhood. To give you an example, within two blocks of my sister's house there's a Conservative group, a Sephardic group, and a small rabbinical school. Sis doesn't live in the really Jewish part of the neighborhood. The local drycleaner cleans tallit's for free as a mitzvah.

It never occured to me that a 70 year old would never have seen someone dressed for shul.

I put it down to her having always lived in a small town in the central California valley.

Comments

[gileswench.livejournal.com]

It's amazing how sheltered people can be when they put their minds to it.

Sometimes it really is a matter of access, but small towns in the Central California valley are still within range of much bigger, more sophisticated places. Also, there's electricity there. There are televisions, radios, and movie theaters. There are libraries. There are people from other places passing through.

My hometown was one of those places really determined to bury its head in the sand. When the population hit 100,000, half of those people were still describing it as a 'small farming community'! Even if it had been every bit as much of a small town as people insisted, it was just over an hour's drive from San Francisco. 'Nuff said. My current home is in a town that still thinks it's in an episode of Leave It To Beaver...but it's a fifteen-minute drive to Berkeley. If you can't find an alternate lifestyle, religion, or political view there, it probably doesn't exist anywhere on the planet. Okay, they don't get a lot of Amish, but it's pretty damn diverse.

Most people who haven't seen anything haven't looked beyond their own doorsteps.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

If it had been the other people at the table, I'd agree with you. But this woman has a lively mind and great curiosity about the world. I don't think it's willfull (does that word have too many Ls?) on her part.

But I do take your point about the cities that maintain they're small towns. I know a couple like that, including the one that Mom moved to when the family left the desert. When I was less than a year old, there were fewer than 1000 people in the town. When I was fifteen, that number went up to 3000 and it officially became a city. There are over 10,000 people there now, and most of the people call it a small town.

[gileswench.livejournal.com]

And I guess I'm quick to get disgusted at how people wear such blinders because most of the places I've lived in, blinders have been amazingly fashionable. It astonishes me how many people in this town consider it to be a bastion of white, politically conservative christianhood when a huge chunk of our population is Asian (mostly Japanese and Pacific Islanders), we've got an active Mosque and a large Buddhist center, and we have a huge LGBT organization that is very politically and socially active in the community. Slowly we're chipping away at Leave It To Beaverville. It's just a really uphill battle, and I get feisty.

Then again, as a child I was part of an extended Chinese family and a member of a Mexican family, as well. Yeah, my parents, my brothers and I all had that super-pale Celtic skin, but we were part of the family. My brothers and I all knew early on that there were two New Years, and the second one had the good food!

Part of it is what's in your area, but part of it is also how far you open your eyes. I do have to admit, though, there are no Sephardic or Hasidic Jews in my town...that I've noticed! I have, however, seen them in other places.