From the Burbs to the Big City
I’ll never forget the time my buddy Ken and I drove out to the next town to look in the sky for the Hale-Bopp Comet a month too early. We found out later that the bright blob in the sky we’d been staring at and willing to move for over an hour was really Mars. But that was just our small town version of entertainment, I guess.
When I moved away to college, I only made it forty-five minutes away from home-this time to a city of 200,000. I suppose I could have commuted, but I wanted to get myself someplace bigger and experience my first taste of independence. What I ended up experiencing was rush hour traffic that clogged the streets with honking maniacs and pedestrians that wandered helplessly in and out of cars.
Although I eventually made friends and learned to drive less like a country bumpkin and more like a road warrior, nevertheless I experienced the familiar pangs of boredom. At three a.m., the only place to go was still Denny’s. I learned to choke down plates of super-greasy food and down gallons of coffee, just so I’d have somewhere to be other than in my apartment. Don’t get me wrong-I saw concerts and went to plays and all that “city” stuff from time to time, but my new “city” just felt like a bigger and less safe version of the town I grew up in.
An exciting night meant that someone with no skill and less luck beat us all at cards. If someone knocked over a cup of coffee onto the deck of cards we played with, that was a landmark event. My big city escape hadn’t yet come to fruition.
Time passed. I finished my degree, albeit not the one I originally set out to get. I felt comfortable in my routine and spent another year and a half in that college town, probably because it never occurred to me to leave.
The only problem was that there weren’t any jobs for people like me. And believe me, I applied for everything from “newspaper call desk help” to ESL teaching positions. My best rejection letter was a polite email that simply stated: “Thank you for your interest, but the dog walking position has already been filled.” I printed and hung that one on my fridge.
It seemed like the longer I stayed in my sleepy college town, the higher rent got and the less money I made freelancing. I decided going away to graduate school would be my meal ticket out of what was becoming a tough economic situation. After all, you can only be creative, poor, and creatively poor for so long before you start eyeballing your neighbor’s retail clothes and flat screen computer monitor with envy instead of disdain.
To make a long story a little less long, I’ll skip the application details and months of planning. Suffice to say, a couple of weeks ago I found myself living in Chicago, waiting for school to start.
The few times I’d been to Chicago before officially becoming a resident with an Illinois Driver’s License, I’d had whirlwind overnight trips to take care of school and apartment business and cram as in many museums as I could before taking the train home the next evening. I loved the city with all my small town heart and couldn’t wait to get there. My clothes would be cooler, my friends more hip, and my evenings packed with culturally relevant activities. Oh, and my hair would look fabulous in all sorts of weather, and I would lose twenty pounds in a week from all the walking. In my fantasies, Chicago was going to change everything about my provincial life and make me an instant rock star.
Well, I’m here now. Ready for the big confession? Okay, here it comesâÂ?¦My life feels exactly the same as before, but everything around me is different.
Sure, I have to remind myself not to make eye contact with the crazy people on the L and not to gawk at the tall buildings like a tourist. I’m getting used to not having a car anymore and sweating my chubby butt off as I hike all over this fair metropolis. I now understand the screeching brakes and bleating horns of insane Chicago drivers are joyous battle cries, as the commute is achieved in a blitzkrieg of wild left turns and dangerous tailgating. By the way, if you’re wondering why I sold my car, that’s the answer. (Besides, my car was worth two months rent.)
All the things I expected from Chicago as my new home have yet to come true, though. I’m still wearing the same old clothes because I’m still broke and things are still expensive. My hair still freaks out if the weather even thinks about changing, despite the different climate zone. I don’t go out much yet, because I don’t know a soul, my cats are still feeling needy from the big move, and the last time I checked I was still poor.
But being the same small town girl in a big city runs deeper than that. It’s my provincial personality that makes me want to smile and talk to the person who makes my soy latte. It’s my naivety that makes tall buildings impressive and cockroaches seem like creatures sent from the pits of hell. But I’ve already gotten into the habit of washing my dishes as soon as I’ve used them and taking out the garbage every day. Heck, I feel grateful to have ended up in a place with so much and so many of everything. The Gay Games are going on in Chicago right now, but the rainbow flags fly in my neighborhood every day no matter what, and that makes me proud to live in such a tolerant and welcoming place.
When I see my fellow Chicagoans walking down the street and not looking at me or anything else, I wonder if they feel like they’ve already seen it all. My eyes still don’t feel big enough to take it all in, and I hope they never stop seeking out new things to marvel at. I’ve lived here long enough to be able to pick out tourists, and that scares me into thinking that perhaps I’ve already become a little more closed off.
I had a professor once who originally came from the same area as me, and she once said: “You can take the girl out of the small town, but you can’t take the small town out of the girl.” If that’s true (and I believe it with all my mushy heart), then I’ll never stop noticing the people who need directions but are too afraid to ask. After all, a tourist is just another stranger, but one who’s more lost than you.
