You Know You Live in a Small(ish) Town When...

[HudsonHawk]

But aside from context you could call a small town any community the kids can't wait to grow up and get the hell out of, only to grow up, old, and retire, and come back to it.

It's like that old Mac Davis song..."happiness was Lubbock, Texas in my rearview mirror..." Or as someone else once put it..."I was born in Lubbock and lived there until I got my driver's license." Not that Lubbock is a one horse town. It just feels like it.

 

[Bugguy]

It's like that old Mac Davis song..."happiness was Lubbock, Texas in my rearview mirror..." Or as someone else once put it..."I was born in Lubbock and lived there until I got my driver's license." Not that Lubbock is a one horse town. It just feels like it.

I was warned to watch for the tumble weed the size of Volkswagens on Lubbock's main street. BTW... I really enjoyed the Buddy Holly Museum.

 

[MisterCairo]

Your local town has its own police "force" with six cruisers.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Your local town has its own police "force" with six cruisers.

But they're armed like an urban SWAT team.

 

[Trenchfriend]

When you see one of your female (class)mates, looking XXL-sized and with a kinderwagen.

 

[Edward]

You know you live in a small town when you realise half the women in town have seen you naked.....


.....because they once changed your nappy.

 

[LizzieMaine]

You know you live in a small town when you realise half the women in town have seen you naked.....


.....because they once changed your nappy.

Or when your first grade teacher used to babysit your mother.

 

[MisterCairo]

Your high school has a graduating class of... one.

I wonder if he made valedictorian?

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-...ate-at-this-nova-scotia-p-12-school-1.4176826

 

[Correus]

Your local town has its own police "force" with six cruisers.

LOL!!!

We have two!

 

[BlueTrain]

The police station in one small town I frequently visited in the 1950s had a police station that was about the size of the inside of a typical gas station office. But that was 50 years ago. The police station in my hometown shared a building with the fire station and both had garage doors. Things have changed since then, not necessarily for the better.

I refer to my hometown as a small town but by the definitions in this thread, it wasn't. It had about 8,400 people in 1960, the most it ever had. But it always seemed very city-like to me. Looking back and thinking about it, it might have been a little like "Bedford Falls," although the geography was all wrong. I don't know where the city limits were but one wouldn't stop counting it as being as part of the town where the legal limit was. Curiously, there was an airfield within the city limits. A very large hospital occupies the space now.

Just like in the Hardy Boys mysteries, there were other villages and hamlets (small towns in reality) not far in any direction. But when we moved to the country in the next county, everyone thought of me as being from the city and that's what I thought, too.

But you're probably from a small town if they read the school lunch menus on the radio.

By the way, my next door neighbor is from near Lubbock. His wife, recently deceased, went to high school for a man who was my boss for many years. Small world.

 

[BlueTrain]

I was going to add that you're in a small town when the undertaker that buried both your mother and father (about 30 years apart) graduated from high school with one of them and you went to the same high school, but that could happen anywhere. I was also going to say that it couldn't be a small town if it had a funeral home but that wouldn't be true, either.

 

[MisterCairo]

...when your local (and only) video store going up for sale as the owners are retiring is the banner headline in your paper:

http://www.stratfordbeaconherald.co...-john-and-judy-george-look-towards-retirement

I was there the other day picking up the season one Preacher DVD set they ordered in for me.

Fun fact: That is the building they bought when the Blockbuster chain went under. That is right - a local video store bought out Blockbuster, once as ubiquitous as McDonald's or Starbucks...

 

[belfastboy]

But they're armed like an urban SWAT team.

Fortunately they are not so armed in Canada. Here the police have to get by with guile and politeness.

 

[MisterCairo]

Fortunately they are not so armed in Canada. Here the police have to get by with guile and politeness.

And a Glock...

 

[BlueTrain]

When we were in London (U.K.) a few years ago, we saw several policemen very heavily armed, even with submachine guns, something one rarely sees here (in person, that is).

 

[Edward]

...when your local (and only) video store going up for sale as the owners are retiring is the banner headline in your paper:

http://www.stratfordbeaconherald.co...-john-and-judy-george-look-towards-retirement

I was there the other day picking up the season one Preacher DVD set they ordered in for me.

Fun fact: That is the building they bought when the Blockbuster chain went under. That is right - a local video store bought out Blockbuster, once as ubiquitous as McDonald's or Starbucks...

There's something gratifying about that, isn't there? I live in part of London where Pizza Hut was replaced by a curry house, and McDonalds a Sari shop. There's something wonderful about going against the homogenising flow.

 

[BlueTrain]

When the local liquor store is replaced by a Mexican restaurant, that would be something, not that I've ever known it to happen.

It might be that we were never as homogeneous as we like to believe. Even when everyone is the same, we're still just a little different. In the working class neighborhood where I grew up, everyone else whose house I ever ate dinner in served pretty much the same thing--and put it on the table, too. They were the houses of my friends and relatives. Even though everyone ate the same thing, it didn't taste the same. I couldn't explain it, though.

But even then, in the 1950s in a real small town (about 7,000), there were immigrants (Italian) and that was even true in the little coal camps that seemed to be around every curve in the road about ten miles further to the west. They were also Italian. And my next door neighbor's daughter, one of them, married a Syrian. And a stone's throw from the graves of my parents and grandparents is a headstone inscribed in Arabic. The person buried there died before I was born.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I live in the "whitest state of the Union," but that's not as homogenous as you'd think. It's very likely if someone here tells you "Oh, I'm part Indian" that they do, in fact, have Native American ancestors not too far back in the line. Intermarriage with the Penobscots and Passamaquoddies was very common for the French and Scotch-Irish people who made up the bulk of the population here during the Colonial era, with the result that there's basically nobody here who's all one ancestry. Add in a heavy immigration of Finns and Germans in the nineteenth century, and Russian Jews in the early twentieth, and we're a pretty diverse brand of "white people."

 

[MisterCairo]

When we were in London (U.K.) a few years ago, we saw several policemen very heavily armed, even with submachine guns, something one rarely sees here (in person, that is).

You would probably see many, many more like that these days...

 

[BlueTrain]

Whitest state in the union? Well, I think it depends on who gets to say who's white (or white enough) and who isn't.

In a related way of seeing things, my wife attended the high school (T.C. Williams) that a movie was made about when the schools in the city were integrated. The movie was "Remember the Titans." I never saw the movie but it was more about the integration of the sports teams than anything else, I think. My wife didn't like the movie because she felt it was too inaccurate and too "Hollywood." And besides that, no part of it was actually filmed in Alexandria. Anyway, today, with all the recent immigrants in the city, nobody is a majority at the school. Everyone is a minority.