Oh, Yeah? How’d It Go?

Summer                                                  Waning Strawberry Moon

We keep our walkin’ around money at the Credit Union, Associated Health Care Workers.  I like credit unions because they’re small and friendly, unlike our mortgage holder, Wells Fargo, who has shafted us time and again.  The credit union knows who we are.  I went in today to pick up our weekly cash and the teller said, “I’m used to having Lynne pick up the money.”  She doesn’t Lynne goes by Kate, but otherwise.  “Yes, she had surgery.”  “Oh, yeah, how did that go?”  “Well.  She’s walking around.”

I grew up in a small town and I value personal interaction with merchants.  It makes me feel known and welcome in a broad, perhaps shallow way; but a wider net of personal connections away from work or friends gives a sense of density to life often, perhaps usually, lost in the city.

The electrician, Jeff, who works on our stuff from time to time was out today.  He lives here in Andover and we talked about bees and hemp while I tried to identify where the fence guys cut the wire to the sheds.  Again, personal.

alexdowntown

In Alexandria, where I lived from age 2 to age 17, most people knew who I was and I knew who they were.  Alexandria had about 5,000 citizens, but the families were much fewer and knowing a family member meant you had some sense of the rest, too.  Yes, it can be suffocating, perhaps more so as an adult, but as a kid, it meant there was no where in town I felt anonymous, a cipher, just a person paying 4 bucks for a latte or buying a new computer.  Neither of which we had of course when I grew up in the 50’s and early 60’s.

You can take the boy out of the small town, but…