(pop: 1758)I took a week off of work and the blahg and anything else that involves the use of a cellular phone or the internet in order to spend time with my grandma. She's old but spry and I figured if I'm going to spend time with her it would be really stupid not to do it now. Plus, I've been meaning to visit her for years (years!) and have never gotten around to it. So although the avoidance of guilt probably shouldn't be a good enough reason to take a one week trip to a one-horse town I went ahead and did it anyway.
There were some highlights (Kansas wheat in the spring is so lush you want to get out of the car and roll around in it. It's like a huge green lawn as far as you can see. And a cup of coffee is $.29!) and some really fucking awful moments (visiting my "uncle" Nick at the nursing home during entertainment hour and listening to the organist play hymns. Because I know it's different for people who grew up in a church, but to an atheist "Amazing Grace" and "How Great Thou Art" are funeral dirges and it's fucking depressing to watch a room full of people at the end of their lives humming along to them.)
Here was the part I really enjoyed, considering I grew up in a series of small towns beginning with this one and have spent almost a decade trying to distance myself
"You're not from around here, are you."
5 comments:
Where I'm from, a town with a population that tops triple digits isn't considered small.
You know what you look like to me, with your fad dog and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. A well scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste. Good nutrition's given you some length of bone, but you're not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Slags? And that font you've tried so desperately to shed. Pure Southwest Kansas. What is your father, dear? Is he a cattle hustler? Does he stink of the herd? You know how quickly the boys found you. All those tedious sticky fumblings in the back seats of cars, while you could only dream of getting out ... geting anywhere ... getting all the way to the big KC.
I'm not really all that well scrubbed.
You may have gone to visit her, but I'm still grandma's favorite.
The Dodge City on you won't wash away no matter how hard you try...
There's only one to get it off. Ask Jarrod Hobbes how he did it.
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