Fancy Things What I Seen in the Big City, pt 1

Just like John Mellencamp, I grew up in a small town. With the exception of one summer spent in Naperville, and a couple seasons in Lincoln for school, I've lived all 27 3/4 years of my life in a town of less than fifteen hundred people. I can't tell you exactly how small Assumption is because the population signs vary depending on from which direction you come into town. What I can tell you is that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve to sixteen hundred people here. We don't even have a four-way stop in town to give directions by, much less a stop light. Until a year ago there were three bars and four churches. Now two of those bars have closed (one of the building has been torn down) and at least one of those churches doesn't seem to be far behind.

There is a grain bin factory in town which supports the three small restaraunts, where you can get anything you want (provided it has been fried and smothered in cheese or gravy, excepting Alice of course), and the gas station which stays open by selling beer and cigarettes to the factory workers every day at 3:30 when the shift lets off. The evidence of said beer and cigarette sales can be seen strewn along the country roads leaving town in all four cardinal directions. (Appearantly people who do not see it fit to take care of their bodies also have a hard time wanting to take care of the earth). Last year when Casey's decided to build a new gas station and restaraunt in town, you would have thought our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ Himself, along with at least half the Apostles and Moses and Elijah to boot, was moving to town. While I worry about straying close to being sacreligious with that statement, I'm pinched to find a strong enough metaphor to convey the fervor which is only now starting to die down.

The school district consolodated with the town up the road about twenty years ago now. Both towns have a grade school. Assumption has the middle school while Moweaqua has a high school. Every Friday night in the fall people swarm to Moweaqua to watch their sons, nephews, cousins, etc risk their bodies for the sake of attaining some false sense of accomplishment. While fleeting, this is important for those who will work at the grain bin factory so they will have something to look back on when they look around one day in the future and realize that life hasn't turned out as they hoped. It makes me wonder if there is a negative corellation between success on the field and success after high school, but we'll leave that for another time. When the team won the state championship back in '96 or '97, the aforementioned fervor surrounding the new Casey's was again in the air.

I write all of this as a long way of saying that I don't get out of the house very often. Although I didn't realize it until a few years ago, the rhythms of small town life seeped into my soul and took root somewhere along the way. While my church tradition does not keep to the traditional church callender, we mark the passing of the seasons by Easter breakfasts, vacation Bible schools, Labor Day get togethers, and Christmas pagents. I find myself more and more marking the passing of time by these events and others like them. I'm finding myself at a point where I don't necessarily distrust bigger cities (ok, that's a lie but I don't completely distrust them), but I do prefer to avoid them as they tend to throw a big old stick in the bicycle wheel which is the rhythm of small town life.

Turns out that a lot of neat stuff goes on out there in the wide world while I'm passing the time away here in Assumption. Every once in a while I will get out of town and discover one of the new ways in which the world has moved forward and improved itself and with appropriate slack-jawed amazement, I will come back and tell people about my discoveries. I like to think of these discoveries as Fancy Things What I Saw in the Big City. I still remember the first time I saw one of those electronic sensory operated paper towel dispensers in a men's bathroom at a Bonanza in Western Montana. I was almost speechless. No, there for about twenty seconds or so I was speechless. Then I washed my hands a second time, waved them under the sensor again, chuckled to myself and upon rejoining my party told them about the amazing machine in the bathroom.

Well I had one of those discoveries again last weekend. Alison and I were visiting her family in Naperville because she was preaching at a young adult service Sunday night. After the serivce, her dad suggested we get pizza at Lou Malnatti's. Now it was already well past my 8:30 bedtime, but Lou's pizza is well worth breaking any established rhythm of life, so I quickly gave my assent and decided I would catch up on rest later. As it turns out, I'm glad I went! Not just because the pizza was amazing (did I mention that the pizza there is A-mazing?), because it was (they have really good pizza there), but also because I made another one of my discoveries of Fancy Things What I Saw in the Big City! Once again, suffice it to say that I was speechless. Fortunately, this time after chuckling to myself I was able to whip out my fancy camera phone and get documented evidence




Now here's an even newer, even fancier way of drying your hands! Basically what you do is you stick your hands in here like this and then as you pull them out, this here machine blows air on them and dries them off. To be perfectly honest, I'm still a little bit speechless! I've even debated looking into seeing what it would cost to get one for my bathroom, but it's been a busy week with all the packing and withdrawing from seminary and all that, so I haven't got to it yet. The best thing is that it really dries your hands, not like those other air hand driers that only do the job so far and leave you to finish it by wiping your hands on you pants.

Well there you have it. Although the terrible disasters of the twentieth century went a long way towards destroying the blind optimism inherent in the liberal, secular nineteenth century mindset, the twenty-first century still gives us glimmers of hope in social progress :p