Small Town Life

There is a magical quality about my hometown that is hard to describe.  To an outsider it may seem just a sleepy college town with nothing particularly noteworthy about it.  After all, it does not have a mall, there is one bowling alley, and only one movie theater with subpar seating and surround sound to see the latest films.  It does not show the latest in fashion trends or have 5 star restaurants, but it has character and charm that cannot be found in a big city.

I think it is a lack of things to do there that made it such a special place to grow up.  I learned to appreciate everything that little town life had to offer.  I can’t tell you how many nights of my youth were spent in my grandmother’s yard with my brothers and cousins playing tag and hide-and-seek or trying to catch lightning bugs in the summer.  We would play until it got too dark and then retire into the house for delicious food and some TV.  Of course the candy dish was raided each time we went inside. 

Countless evenings were also spent walking around the neighborhood with my mother and brothers, down streets full of shady trees and colorful flowers, past parks and creeks that were always at a different water level, and often stopping to talk with someone we knew from around the neighborhood that happened to be out enjoying the evening as well.

Our university’s cross country course offered countless trails and hidden paths to play in at all times of the day and night.  It is a gem that few people know about or appreciate.  It is a place where nature abounds and you can go for peace and fresh air.  The fields are covered in wildflowers of all colors that dance and sway with the grass as the wind blows, and it being Oklahoma, they are always putting on a good show.  Birds and other critters chirp and chatter happily from unseen places off the side of the trail.  From time to time people can be seen out there hitting golf balls or flying their model airplanes.  It really is a marvelous place.   Even up into college I would take my books out there, sneak off the trail, and study hidden away by trees where I could focus and enjoy nature at the same time.

I really don’t think there is anything more wonderful than being out for a walk in a small town in the fall when the leaves begin to change and the smell of a woodsmoke fire fills the air. When you have nothing to do but enjoy your walk and look forward to a birthday dinner with family at the end of the day.   Nothing is better, unless, say, it is a spring day where the weather is nice and warm with a promise of an Oklahoma thunderstorm in the evening.  It might seem strange to an outsider, but I think most Oklahomans enjoy the excitement and energy of a spring storm.  We get a thrill of checking our intuition about the weather with the latest reports of the state famous meteorologists.

Downtown gives off a feeling of times gone by and lazy days spent out with family and friends.  Old downtowns like ours are a glimpse back to a different time in America. A time free of Wal Marts and chain restaurants. In our town you can still find the American Legion, an old barbershop, furniture stores, cafes, jewelry stores, thrift shops, and restaurants of all sorts.   I can spend hours just wandering the alleys of downtown and stopping in for a drink at the café where I almost always see someone I know.  I have wonderful memories of having a good drink or two at the pub with my brothers or friends, and then riding bikes around until dark without a care in the world.

The university has always been a very special place to me.  It is a timeless place where you can feel the years of accumulated knowledge and dreams in the trees, grass, and buildings.  I have grown up hearing the library’s bell ring daily, in a way acting as the soundtrack of my life.  I used to roam the campus as a child, fishing in the pond and feeding ducks that call it home.  I have never stopped appreciating the university and all that is has done for my family and I. 

I now live in a big city across the world from my hometown, but I often find myself still daydreaming about the walking the streets I used to roam and thinking back to simple nights spent with family and friends just enjoying each other’s company.  I don’t know where my fiancée and I will end up living after we get married, but I hope that at some point I can give her the chance to experience life outside of a big city, even if it just for a few years.  Big cities may offer more in the way of shopping and things to do, but I think that small towns can make us more appreciative for the small things in life.

Big City Life

Having come from a fairly small town, living in my second megalopolis has been quite an experience.  I was used to being called a "city boy" back home by some and that is because I lived in a town of nearly 46,000 people.  A sizable city you may think if you were to compare it to the smaller ones that surround it with populations of 3,000 people or less.  Believe me, there are some with less than that back near where I am from.  The kind of towns that you drive through if you roll through the four-way stop.  The kind of towns that have that similar layout of a gas station (serving as the local watering hole and hangout joint), an old self-wash car wash (if it is a fairly 'large' town), and a few houses of varying states of decrepitness.

I used to think my hometown was fairly large as well until I moved overseas and into the heart of Seoul.  Seoul has a city populations of over 10 million and a metro over over 25 million. Yes, you read that right. Slap on six zeros behind that 25.  If you think of your local Wal-Mart as being crowded on a pre-holiday evening, I can assure you that you haven't seen anything yet.  The cartloads may be bigger back home, but until you have elbowed your way through a store, you can't really say you have experienced being somewhere crowded.  Riding the subway is generally fine in terms of space.  Often times there are plenty of open seats even on the busiest lines, but, and I mean but, wait until you hit rush hour when everyone is getting off work.  Those Discovery and Travel Channel shows about Tokyo where people are nicely shoved into trains that are overflowing with people are a reality.  Take it from me, the best way to get on is to just lean against the people and sort of just lay back.  If you can manage to do just that you have successfully boarded the train.  Human osmosis would have happened and you would have been sucked into the crowd without problems.

Bangkok is also a monster of a city.  Sporting over 8 million people in the city proper and over 14 million in the entire outlying area, there are a lot of people everywhere.  I have seen traffic jams within the city itself that would cause your blood pressure to rise just by looking at a snapshot of it.  Being unemployed I have become sort of an export mall wanderer.  Scoff if you will, but these malls are big enough to get lost in.  The Siam Paragon near where Soojeong works is one of the biggest shopping malls in Asia. It has everything you could want from Rolls Royce, Lamborghini, Gucci, Prada, Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, Lotus, Mazeratti, restaurants, cafes, movie theater, 8,000 square foot gourmet market, and the largest aquarium in Southeast Asia.  To navigate a behemoth like this requires skill and stamina.

Don't get me wrong, big cities are great for entertainment and shopping.  It is so nice being able to have such a variety of shops and restaurants to choose from when you want to go out for the day.  My town boasts one movie theater (maybe two now), one bowling alley, and not a single full-sized mall.  I have become more of a city person than most of my fellow classmates who moved to bigger cities in America are.  Los Angeles and New York City might be large with their 4 and 8 million people respectively, but Seoul still dwarfs them and my time in Tokyo (with 13 million people in the city and 35 million in the metro) set me up for the win. I have been to almost every type of cafe you can think of, hit countless museums of various sorts, spent time wandering palace grounds, and seen the latest and greatest technology being implemented in buildings and other public institutions.

When all is said and done though, I would much rather live out my days in a smaller city.  Sure I may not have all of the options for entertainment and food, but there is something magical about streets lined with big shady trees, parks that have creeks and lots of grass to play on, and little local restaurants where people really get to know one another.  Besides, I can always hop on a plane and go and visit one of the big cities that I have called home in the past.  I have the experience and know how to survive in a bustling city where there are plenty of people and more buildings than trees.  I may be a 'city boy' these days by virtue of circumstance, but I would like to think that I still remain a small town boy living in a big city. Call me a city boy if you will, but as for me, all I can say is 'thank God I'm a country boy.'