Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Photo taken by author at Fiestas, 2012.

The last post ended with the idea that Truth or Consequences is a "familiar place," to me, a hometown of sorts. A hometown is a whole lot of who people are. There is a story in the New Testament, in Mark, about Jesus going to his hometown. I read as the liturgist a few weeks ago. It was interesting.

Mark 6:1-6. "Jesus left there and went to his hometown, accompanied by his disciples. When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were amazed. 'Where did this man get these things?' they asked. 'What's this wisdom that has been given him, that he even does miracles! Isn't this the carpenter? Isn't this Mary's son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren't his sisters here with us?' And they took offense at him. Jesus said to them, 'Only in his hometown, among his relatives, and in his own house is a prophet without honour.' He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. And he was amazed at their lack of faith."

I think this brings the tension between the nostalgic warm fuzzy idea of a hometown, especially a small town, up against the idea that our most familiar places can be hard places. Testing places. Even for the son of God. "But, you know," says Jim Carrey,  "you can't be a star at home." Jesus would have understood. Elvis said that "more than anything else, I want the folks back at home to think right of me." 

There are reasons people leave their homes and hometowns. There are reasons they come back. There are reasons they stay. It is the home part of the hometown that carries the weight. Some two thousand years ago Pliny the Elder, a Roman naval commander, philosopher and naturalist, is said to have coined the phrase "home is where the heart is." T. S. Eliot wrote that "home is where one starts from." Laura Ingalls Wilder, of Little House on the Prairie fame, said that home "is the nicest word there is.” George Augustus Moore said that a “man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.” And Robert Frost wrote that "home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." 

It is hard finding a good quote about home being a hard place, except another by Wilder that said there "is no comfort anywhere for anyone who dreads to go home.” I was hoping David Sedaris would have something really funny to say about home being the place where they rip the heart right out of you, and if you are lucky they graft it back, and then you move back so you don't have to explain the scars. Striving to be fair and balanced, in the face of overwhelming sentiments that favor home as the keeper of all that is good, is not easy. But there is something to this idea that when we talk about where we are from, we are also talking about who we are, and we tend to focus on the better parts of our places and selves.  

It is an undeniable fate that homes, and by extension hometowns, leave indelible marks on people. How can communities make sure they are writing good stories? The narratives we write about places, and how we go about making places are the central considerations of my dissertation. A huge part of my research is looking at the people 'writing' place narratives and making places and talking to them.  We all do this to some extent, but some people do a lot more. I was lucky in my first real interview to talk to one of these people. 

My first formal interview was with a local leader and mentor to many.We spend four hours talking at Bar-B-Que on Broadway. People light up when they see him. He is the sort of person you want in your hometown, a decent guy who cares in both a general way and very specifically. He keeps a great many commitments to the town even though he spends a good deal of his year away from home. We talk through through the breakfast rush and the lunch rush. When we leave Kathy tells us to come back when we "can't stay for so long," with a friendly smile. It was a good place to be on a Thursday in July. Every table is a portrait of why so many people want to be from small towns or live in one. Smiling, saying hello, laughing and sharing stories over great food. On the other hand every table could just as easy have been a perfect reason why some kid is dying to get away. There are a dozen people who remember you at 3 and 4 and 10 and 15, and remember most of the rotten things you did. And they love you anyway. You can feel teens shudder at the thought. There is no getting lost in this crowd. 

A lot of people know him. A lot of people love him. You can tell this pretty easily. He loves them back. This is pretty easy to see too. He moved to T or C the summer before the 4th grade. He went down to Las Cruces after he graduated from high school to get his teaching credentials at NMSU, focusing on History with  minor in English. He then got a Masters Degree in History at NMSU and spent some time teaching in El Paso, Juarez and Guadalajara . After a few years he came home for a spell to publish a consumer newsletter. This is when an intrepid and brilliant Sherry Fletcher called to ask if he would teach at the alternative high school. Ten years later, as the school closed its doors due to decreasing enrollment, He had picked up a PhD and was the school principle. He was also raising two sons.

There were a lot of really sharp things that He said about places, hometowns, and people. I asked if I could share of few of these in this post.The idea that came though in almost every answer to my questions about place and place making was connection. What it means to have connections to a place and the people there. How important these connections are to him and to creating good places no matter where he is. What it means to have these connections to home when we are far from home. He feels very connected to Truth or Consequences. People may know your business, he says, but that can keep you from falling through the cracks. Even when he is halfway around the world, he still knows what is going on in town. T or C is his home, he says, no matter where he is or what else he is doing. A good home connects us, generally to family, but also to other kinds of things, like security. A good hometown connects us to one another, but also to other kinds of things, like opportunities to link to the wider world.  

Big cities generally have a cultural advantage in this way. But small towns have an advantage too. We can create a sense of history through familiar landmarks, knowing people, working together. He remarks that there is not a lot of formality in the town. People are pretty open and friendly, even people you don't know, or don't know yet. Korean's, he tells me, don't wave. Although he does have a couple of guards he sees daily into the happy habit of waving these days, a story about being open and friendly that nicely illustrates his personality. He is currently the MHS Academic Affairs Director at the SMIC Private School in Shanghai, China. The rest of the day I notice how often people wave. 

He talks about how the T or C community has worked at creating a strong sense of history and a lively cultural scene through establishing a historic district, holding yearly festivals, bringing in exhibits and speakers and other activities. He brings up the Smithsonian Museum’s traveling exhibit New Harmonies: Celebrating American Roots Music that came to the Geronimo Springs Museum in April. He is animated as he talks about making things happen with volunteers. He still sits on the Board for the 4th Street Computer Lab and attends meetings from China via Skype. A sense of history and place connections run strongly through T or C, he says. He brings up his ten year high school reunion, where people like me, who lived in the area when they were young, came back because they still felt these connections to this place. 

There are problems, and he talks about these with the same passion and knowledge. There is crushing poverty and a lack of opportunity. There are not enough chances for kids to see the value of education. There are fears of changing and developing, of turning into a place where families of young kids and older folks on fixed incomes are not priorities. The backbone of the town is volunteers, and while this model can makes deep connections and can turn out a fine fiesta, it cannot be the only way community needs are met. There are a basic services that need to be in place for a place to prosper. It's hard to get ahead, and hard to stay afloat. This is true in places all over, but especially true in rural New Mexico. People may know your business, and may try to keep you from falling through the cracks, but sometimes the need create chasms. Support networks can be fragile, especially if they are entirely dependent on volunteers. 

We create high expectations for kids, he says, but we have to have examples of success to show them as well. To this end, one of the best things communities can do to create success is to have vision and to have leaders who have a sense of vision. Celebrating and recognizing history is key to creating a sense of place he remarks, but learning to see the possibilities in the world means having other models and experiences too. He talks about his travels and seeing the world, which he has done extensively. I agree a that love for your own place can more easily take root when you have been to others. This love of home grows in other ways too, but there is something about distance and the heart growing fonder that is true.  

You have to have diversity He says, in people, in experience, and in economic opportunities. This is the richness of experience that renders your own places vivid. You bring back this richness when you have gone away.  But what we take with us, he says, is home grown. He wraps up our interview with a story of how his home grown experience and connections impacted the life of a Chinese friend and graduate student in Korea. Through his mentoring, this friend wrote a thesis and finished his degree. We are always influences by our place and the people in our hometown, and what we learn there. This extends far out into the world he says. It translates from here to other places, and to the communities we make and choose. These connections are what hold us together no matter where we are. The world seems very small when he tells this story. Not stifling small, but small in the sense that you cannot get too lost, because all roads lead home.