Small-town, USA

My homegirl LJK has been reading E.B. White's essay "Here is New York" for the first time, and our reflections and observations about the prose have been seeping into our conversations for weeks. We have discovered that our sentiments about this city that we love are the same sentiments that White noted in 1947. After one of our "this essay rocks" conversations, I was reminded of a section that I remembered reading two years ago, a section when White describes how NYC is a city made up of small towns. At the time, I read, I didn't fully understand, but now when I read the same words, I get it.

See if you do, too:

"The oft-quoted thumbnail sketch of New York is, of course: 'It's a wonderful place, but I'd hate to live there.' I have an idea that people from villages and small towns, people accustomed to the convenience and the friendliness of neighborhood over-the-fence living, are unaware that life in New York follows the neighborhood pattern. The city is literally a composite of tens of thousands of tiny neighborhood units...But the curious thing about New York is that each large geographical unit is composed of countless small neighborhoods. Each neighborhood is virtually self-sufficient. Usually it is no more than two or three blocks long and a couple of blocks wide. Each area is a city within a city within a city... Every block or two, in most residential sections of New York, is a little main street.... So complete is each neighborhood, and so strong the sense of neighborhood, that many a New Yorker spends  a lifetime within the confines of an area smaller than a country village."

I get it now. My neighborhood is Clinton Hill, a neighborhood in Brooklyn that is surrounded by the neighborhoods of friends: Park Slope, Fort Greene, Crown Heights. We take the same C train, go to the same Post Office. We run into each other on the subway platform and getting juice at Mr. Melon. We know the East African women who ring up our groceries, the Australian bartender at Hot Bird, the homeless man in a wheelchair who wears a bright orange vest and wheels around in the middle of the street. We're representatives of our neighboring neighborhoods, taking turns to meet in the middle or introducing each other to new restaurants that pop up on our "main streets."

I realize that this relationship I have to my neighborhood is a mirror image of the small town communities of South Dakota where I grew up. My 600 person town of Waubay, S.D. was 10 minutes from another small town, Webster, which was 10 minutes from Groton. We drove to these tiny towns to visit friends and family and watch our rival basketball teams play each other.  We became familiar with Main Streets and diners and gas stations of the small communities in the same way that I do that in New York.

As it turns out, life in NYC seventy years ago compared to today is the same in a lot of ways.
And life in NYC compared to life in small-town South Dakota is the same in a lot of ways, too.
It's these parallels that keep me grounded in knowing that our lives are a part of a interconnected legacy. Life is bigger and dates back longer than we realize.  I get it.