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

[sheeplady]

As a woman, I note a visible difference in men's behavior based upon how I am dressed. Any dress/ skirt; no matter how raggedy, I typically get doors held open for me. Pants, no matter how nice, nope. More "miss" and "ma'am" too. If I'm in a store I get better service, although it is often of the "sweetheart do you need any help?" variety.

I've also noticed that other women tend to be a bit more polite to me and i get slightly better service as well, even if it's a denim skirt with a hole in it paired with sneakers.

 

[Fading Fast]

Three years ago my New Years's Resolution was to drink more Champagne as every day provides some reason to celebrate and at my age just having the day is reason enough. It remains the only resolution that I have ever managed to keep. In our travels we now specialize in finding the drinkable cheap stuff and have extended the resolution to cover all types of bubbly. One of our favourites is from New Mexico of all places...."Gruet" I think is the name and correct spelling. Who knew they made champagne in NM!!!

Too funny, as we to "discovered" both Gruet and bubbly from New Mexico several years back as, IMHO, it is the best low-to-mid teens bottle of sparkling we've found. The price has been creeping up recently to $20, but with a little effort, I can still usually find it in the mid or (occasionally) even low teens.

We found we really enjoy sparkling wine many years ago and, kinda like you, said let's find some reasonably priced ones so that we can enjoy it regularly and not just on special occasions. Now, pizza, Gruet or similar and a DVD (or, more likely, streamed) movie is a great Friday night for us.

It's kind of a shame that sparkling has such a "snooty" reputation as there's plenty of reasonably priced ones out there that, I think, more people would enjoy if it didn't have the image that it does.

 

[Fading Fast]

As a woman, I note a visible difference in men's behavior based upon how I am dressed. Any dress/ skirt; no matter how raggedy, I typically get doors held open for me. Pants, no matter how nice, nope. More "miss" and "ma'am" too. If I'm in a store I get better service, although it is often of the "sweetheart do you need any help?" variety.

I've also noticed that other women tend to be a bit more polite to me and i get slightly better service as well, even if it's a denim skirt with a hole in it paired with sneakers.

A tie with a suit or sport coat versus jeans or similar casual attire is the man's version of what you describe. I get a lot more "sir," more attentive service, a generally higher level of, I guess, respect when I wear a tie with a suit or sport coat. In jeans or similar attire, I get less "sir," more casual service and attention, etc.

 

[BlueTrain]

The county where my hometown is has a population of 57 people per square km and the whole state is only 30. But where I live now, the population density is 1,086 people per km². Yet I have seen more wildlife where I live now than anywhere I have ever lived. My boss's wife is from Wyoming (they met in Vienna, Austria), which has a density of 2.3 km².

 

[sheeplady]

What is fascinating to me is that we just moved from a decent sized city (500,000 in the "metro" area) to a small town in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. When I went vintage in my former city, people would stop and stare, even if I just rolled my hair, wore an A-line skirt, and wore victory rolls.

So far in this little town no one has given me a second look. Even when I go to a box store in one of the nearby cities no one has thus far even paused to look at me. The only thing I can figure out is that this area has a high Anabaptist population (Amish, Mennonites, and Brethren) and it isn't uncommon when you go to the store to see at least one woman (likely several) who is/ are wearing a prayer cap or bonnet. And I've seen Mennonite women wearing what seems similar to victory roles.

So I'm guessing I just fit into their perceptions of what is normal for this area. Although I haven't worn one of my hats yet, or a vintage suit. We'll see how that works.

 

[BlueTrain]

Most people have no idea what you drink at home, so go ahead and drink whatever you like. But chances are, they will know that you drink.

Although I can understand how you might get a little better attention in a store if you are dressed up, it would be more accurate to say that it depends on exactly how you are dressed, as opposed to whether you are dressed up or not. In other words, you have to be dressed appropriately. If you are shopping for a car, for instance, you want to be taken seriously, so you dress up. But in, say, an outdoor store, that probably wouldn't help. But the variations are endless and the stores can be so different as to cancel out your efforts. We've bought two new cars in the last two years (replacing cars that were both at least fifteen years old) and we received quite different assistance at different dealers. Let me mention to any car salesman reading this, that you will kill a sale for sure if you ride along on a test drive.

Some of the best service we have ever received outside of very tiny shops has been at big box stores, believe it or not. Both Lowe's and Home Depot have wonderful employees, at least based on our own experiences. Some of them may have worked before at the little hardware stores that the big box stores have put out of business. I even find the employees at Walmart, nearly all immigrants, to be helpful, polite and interesting. But I may not have the same expectations of being served that others do. The people in the stores are not servants, just clerks.

I frequently have seen plain people in some places, including back where I'm from in West Virginia, where they are usually referred to as "German Baptists." Where I live now, though, I more often see women wearing head scarves. But that's okay, too.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've always found, as a woman over 50, that I'm pretty much invisible in public. I could ride a bicycle down Main Street the wrong way, wearing a gorilla suit dyed fuchsia, and nobody would give me a second look.

 

[Harp]

I live in Oak Lawn, Illinois, a lovely suburb southwest of Chicago, and several years ago I had to attend night court to argue down a traffic ticket;
which I did by pleading guilty, much to the magistrate's surprise; but then walking to my car I stopped by the town's military memorial to all fallen
Oak Lawn residents. The name inscriptions date back to the Black Hawk campaign, though I was especially drawn to a more recent name that cited
a Vietnam-era parachute training death. Just one small town and so much history woven around it.

 

[sheeplady]

I've always found, as a woman over 50, that I'm pretty much invisible in public. I could ride a bicycle down Main Street the wrong way, wearing a gorilla suit dyed fuchsia, and nobody would give me a second look.

Profanity, it better not be that, yet. I'm only 35.

Although the other day I bought wine in the stores and they were supposed to check my ID (I did the self check out thing) and the guy told me as I took out my wallet I had living ID (my kids). I've got a 4 year old and a 1 year old. I know I don't look under 21 anymore, but technically I could be about 20ish-46ish based on my living ID. I think the guy knew I just needed some wine and typed in a random number, because the kiddos chose at that moment to act up.

Here we don't recycle glass curbside, so I've been collecting bottles for a month until I can go to the recycling center. My husband drinks a glass of wine a night for his cholesterol and I have a small glass as well for my heart... we've got a bottle collection going. Anybody who comes in our back room is going to think we had one heck of a party by the time I get to the recycling center.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I once got pulled over by a cop while carrying a load of empty bottles from work in my back seat -- probably twenty dollars worth of beer bottles, and the whole car smelled like stale beer. "What did you have to drink tonight?" asked the Law. "Alka Seltzer," I truthfully replied.

 

[Fading Fast]

I've always found, as a woman over 50, that I'm pretty much invisible in public. I could ride a bicycle down Main Street the wrong way, wearing a gorilla suit dyed fuchsia, and nobody would give me a second look.

What I experienced around 50 (I'm 52 now) is that I became invisible to women in their 20s / early 30s - literally, they stare right through me.

The flip is women in their later 30s and 40s definitely give a look see (I'm an average looking guy, period, this is not my ego talking). What my women friends of that age have told me is that the pickings are very slim for women in that age group, so any potential candidate is noticed (I think the backhanded compliment to me was lost on them, so no offense was taken).

It is jarring though when you first start to notice you're invisible to an entire age group.

 

[BlueTrain]

The phenomenon of being invisible while being in plain sight out in public occurs in other ways and in other places. Bums and homeless people are completely invisible to most people, I think. Pretending they don't exist is the easy way out. Only slightly more difficult is getting them to move to the next county, which is the usual solution to those problems, if indeed a homeless person could be said to move. In the same way, in places where there are different groups that don't exactly intermingle, one group will refuse to acknowledge that the other people are there. Conversely, to some people, those very same people, including the homeless and the panhandlers, are highly visible.

But likewise, some people go out of their way to be noticed, which sometimes has unfortunate results. Teenage girls, for example, sometimes tend to wear attention-getting outfits, presumably for that reason. And some individuals, male and female, wear things that might be described as provocative and not in a good way. The ultimate attention-getting outfits are probably the dresses that movie stars appear in at movie premiers and similar events. And then there are wedding gowns. A bride's dress, however, is something that is expected, almost like a vestment, or a highly ceremonial garment.

 

[ChiTownScion]

What is fascinating to me is that we just moved from a decent sized city (500,000 in the "metro" area) to a small town in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. When I went vintage in my former city, people would stop and stare, even if I just rolled my hair, wore an A-line skirt, and wore victory rolls.

So far in this little town no one has given me a second look. Even when I go to a box store in one of the nearby cities no one has thus far even paused to look at me. The only thing I can figure out is that this area has a high Anabaptist population (Amish, Mennonites, and Brethren) and it isn't uncommon when you go to the store to see at least one woman (likely several) who is/ are wearing a prayer cap or bonnet. And I've seen Mennonite women wearing what seems similar to victory roles.

So I'm guessing I just fit into their perceptions of what is normal for this area. Although I haven't worn one of my hats yet, or a vintage suit. We'll see how that works.

That's an amazing area. I wanted to finish up my bachelor's degree at Eastern Mennonite College (now a university) in Harrisonburg and took a trip there back in 1974. I thought that, as a kid raised Catholic from Chicago who was (at that time, anyway) contemplating a career as a military officer, being exposed to Anabaptist people with strong pacifist views would be about as far from where I was coming from as one could envision, and that it would be an education in itself. And the area is so rich in history that you could almost taste it in the air.

Alas, my parents let me know that I was not to expect so much as a nickel in support for my higher education and I simply couldn't afford Eastern Mennonite on my own. No complaints over the way that my education did play out, but I still think that my plan was solid and would have been an enriching experience.

 

[tonyb]

I once got pulled over by a cop while carrying a load of empty bottles from work in my back seat -- probably twenty dollars worth of beer bottles, and the whole car smelled like stale beer. "What did you have to drink tonight?" asked the Law. "Alka Seltzer," I truthfully replied.

John Law once detained me briefly on account of a more-than-slightly cracked windshield on the '65 Ford Econoline I drove at the time. He asked me to identify the dark liquid in that one-quart mayonnaise jar on the floor of the van. "Iced coffee" was my truthful response. I held it up so that he might get a whiff of it, if he were so inclined. He suggested I get a new windshield (which I did, shortly thereafter) and sent me on my way.

 

[Trenchfriend]

I've always found, as a woman over 50, that I'm pretty much invisible in public. I could ride a bicycle down Main Street the wrong way, wearing a gorilla suit dyed fuchsia, and nobody would give me a second look.

You got a perfect "Main-Street", there. Could be a nice place for vintage-clothing bicycle runs, like the Tweed-Runs or similar. If I would live there, this would be a joy for me, to take part. I take the bike, grab my flatcap and the white poloshirt, hooray.

 

[BlueTrain]

Large cities can sometimes have a lot of small-town characteristics, too, you know, perhaps more so in the past than at present. But the present is so difficult to see as it always has been. One's vision is colored or clouded by looking both at the past and forward to the future. Be that as it may be or may not be, it was not uncommon for families to grow up in a neighborhood and live there for most of the lives, with most of your relatives living not very far away. That was certainly true where I grew up in a small town, although I hardly lived my whole life there. I haven't even lived my whole life yet anyway.

One branch of my wife's family has lived on the same piece of land since before the Civil War, although that started when it was a rural area, then was absorbed by the town. I don't know if you'd call it a small town or not, though. I guess with a population of 150,000 people it isn't a small town but is it a large city?

A better example is my wife and her father's side of the family. We were married in Washington, D.C. within sight of where not only she was born but also her father and one of her sisters. I don't know if that's a characteristic of a small town or what but neither of my parents were born where I was born and grew up. But as cities go, Washington, D.C. isn't all that large. Curiously, the population of the city peaked around 1950, same as it did in my hometown. People who live around here naturally don't see it the same as people who live in other places. Everything that happens here is local news to us. That's probably to be expected but sometimes it overloads the brain.

I suppose it has to be a pretty small town before the people you know outnumber the people you don't know. Of course, some know more people than others do, so perhaps people have different ideas of what a small town might be.

 

[sheeplady]

That's an amazing area. I wanted to finish up my bachelor's degree at Eastern Mennonite College (now a university) in Harrisonburg and took a trip there back in 1974. I thought that, as a kid raised Catholic from Chicago who was (at that time, anyway) contemplating a career as a military, being exposed to Anabaptist people with strong pacifist views would be about as far from where I was coming from as one could envision, and that it would be an education in itself. And the area is so rich in history that you could almost taste it in the air.

Alas, my parents let me know that I was not to expect so much as a nickel in support for my higher education and I simply couldn't afford Eastern Mennonite on my own. No complaints over the way that my education did play out, but I still think that my plan was solid and would have been an enriching experience.

I am very close to Harrisonburg, as you likely guessed. There is a *very* rich history here, and in particular, a very complex one. I've been learning more about the civil war and how with the Anabaptist tradition in the valley, it really was a brother against brother (and sister against sister) war, and just absolutely tore some families apart. It is interesting to see how the history is treated here in regards to the civil war compared to over the mountains towards the east. Harrisonburg right now is a growing city.

I grew up in the Adirondack Mountains, and I have to say that this piece of earth is just as pretty, if not more so. Certainly has better weather.

 

[tonyb]

I knew people in certain Seattle districts -- Rainier Valley, Ballard, West Seattle -- who rarely left their neighborhoods. Especially in the case of those latter two entries, pretty much everything a person needed to conduct his or her daily affairs could be had within a mile or two of home.

But that's going back a few decades now. Many of those people have since shuffled off, and the remainder ain't far behind. Times change.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My mother has spent all but five years or so of her 78 years on earth living on the same street. She's seven houses up from the house she grew up in. She and her next-door neighbor have been next-door frenemies for more than sixty-five years. They're in a contest now to spite each other by outliving each other.

 

[tonyb]

My sister-in-law, my departed brother's widow, rejoined him this past November. She had resided all but the first one of her 63 years in two houses within sight of each other on a hilltop in southeast Seattle. I resist saying, for fear I won't be believed, just how little the fellow who would become her husband paid for that second house, in 1975. That house is now 109 years old, and in better condition than it was when she moved in, 42 years ago.