Small Towns

I grew up in a very small town.  A lot of people will say they did too.  No...I'm not talking about a small city, with a few thousand people, I'm talking about a tiny little  hovel with 300 people.  I'm not exaggerating, I never in a million trillion years ever exaggerate.  We maxed out at 300 at best.  We had to change the sign when someone died.  We never had to when someone moved in, because that never happened.

My class had 8 people in it.  Yep.  Four girls, four boys.  Two were twins.  None of the other 3 girls lived in town, so I was the only one that didn't ride the bus.  I lived one block from school.  My mom was the secretary, so I couldn't do anything bad or she'd find out about it before I even got in trouble for it.  BUT even if she wasn't on the premises, she would have heard all about it for sure.  Basically sports were the measure of a person's worth.  Sportsmen were gods and goddesses.  If you were good at Football or Basketball, you were it.  If not, you were worthless.  I wasn't even on the scale!  LOL.

If you sneezed and there was a speck of blood in it, the lady two houses down would call the lady next to her and tell her that you had lost a ton of blood and were being rushed to the ER.  That lady would call the other lady across the street and tell her that you were in the ER and barely clinging to life and in need of a blood donation.  That lady would call the neighbor guy and tell him that you were in dire need of a kidney transplant and you were offering millions of dollars for someone to donate one.  It would go off in various directions from there.  It would develop a life of its own and some would have you dead, some would not even have a shred of something correct left in it.  Men were NOT immune to this either.  Men are sometimes worse than women at spreading dreadful lies and gossip.  They have coffee three times a day at the local eatery just like the women do and they can't even talk about sewing and cooking.  One can only ruminate on the state of the corn and the high price of gas for so long until they make something up to impress each other.

If Matilda knew you had sneezed but you didn't call her and tell her, she'd just make it up.  "I know something happened over there, I am pretty sure I saw blood and the ambulance.  She must be almost dead....or some old ladies even felt they had the right to know what was going on.

My father still lives in the house I grew up in. Smack dab in the middle of town.  He is in the thick of things when it comes to gossip himself, but when he was starting to date my now step-mom, she came the first time to visit him and parked her car in front of his house.  Nosey Nora across the street honed in on the strange car and had the nerve to call my dad!  She insisted she had to know who that car belonged to and why is parked in front of his house?  I'm not sure what Dad said, but if I had answered the phone I would have said something like "oh that's my lesbian lover who gave me the Clap and she told me she got it from you."  Good thing I wasn't around that day.

I have come to despise such invasive and hurtful gossip.  They don't even keep the story straight, it just morphs into a saga all its own and the more juicy, corrupt, and hateful they can make it, the better.  These idiots need hobbies, they need a life.  When my parents got divorced, you can just imagine the stories that flew about town with such speed and such utter filth I was nauseated.

So, coming from a tiny hovel of 300 old gossipy geezers, I was THRILLED to move to a city of 9,000 people for college!!  I was amazed at how you could live in a place where you might not even know who your neighbor was, let alone who their parents were and where they worked and what they ate for supper.  There was a Walmart, Pizza Hut, and Dairy Queen within walking distance!!  What else could a person want?  Our closest of any of those was a half hour drive away when I was growing up.

I could even walk down the street without anybody peering out from behind their curtains to see who I was and make up where I was going!  Wow.  This was great.  Nobody even cared what I did or whom I might have done it with.  I could wear what I wanted without anyone critiquing it, go out without doing my hair without an alarm going off, and I could be me.

When you only have 3 other girls in your class, and you are not exactly like them, you feel alone in the world.  I never met another person like myself until college.  The day I met another girl who felt exactly like I did with my mother and the divorce, I sobbed.  I had found someone else who knew what I had gone through.   I had felt like I was abnormal, weird, odd.  Now I KNOW I am a little odd, but I'm ok with it...giggle.

I just wasn't the same as anyone else in my school.  (we did join with a neighboring school in HS, but our graduating class was 35 people so still slim pickins)  I was ok just the way I was, as were they, we were just different.  Different

In college you can and are encouraged to explore who you really are, what you like and what you don't like.  How you really want to dress, it may not be how the other girls are all dressed, you might want to try something new.  It was mind boggling.

I now live in a HUGE city of about 8,000 and I am so happy!  I would never go back to any small hovel again.  I don't even enjoy going back to visit very much.  All those beady little eyes peering out at you and making up lies about you to each other.  I feel so sad for those kids from my school who never left that environment.  But as long as I don't have to go back there, I'm good!!