Boy Wandering: My Small Town Day

My mom’s in town. Fresh from Iowa, where she can live through a tamer version of Vermont’s weather three days before Vermonters do. It’s a little game we play.

So we went wandering today. First time I’ve been wandering in the downtown streets of Montpelier in quite some time. And since I was the odd-person out in the threesome of me, my mom and my daughter, I got to wander alone. Cool.

Hello, Montpelier.

I spread tiny amounts of money throughout the town, on coffee, beer, books, pens, notebooks and a barn door handle. Nothing was odd in Montpelier today. It was just as it usually is, reminding me of walking down a high school hallway – so much familiar and yet so much avoided.

Actually, it was odd that the man from Somers Hardware (R.I.P.) was behind the counter at his former nemesis and – ultimately – conqueror, Aubuchon Hardware. Frankly, it startled me a bit, feeling too much like an hallucinatory flashback. Or, for a more modern explanation, try this: My mind went all “WTF.”

But I wasn’t alone. Others made a note of the fact that the man who worked in the family-run hardware store next door for generations was now behind the counter working for the chain-store giant that had (finally!) run him out of business so as to expand (read: monopolize).

He put his best smile on it, just like any small town like Montpelier would require him to. That’s how you survive. And the people who commented on his presence in his former predator’s workspace seemed happy about it all, too.

“This is good,” one elderly woman said, summing up the position that was inevitable from the small town’s residents. Because that’s how you survive.

Smile. Say it is good. And carry on.

Hello, Montpelier.

I saw my old friend and colleague, Mason Singer, while wandering today. He was worrying about the overly eager “parking-meter ladies” when I stumbled upon him. Mason was the creative director at Food & Water for years. He was the design genius who made the Food & Water Journal look the way it did. We conversed as if years did not separate our last conversation, just like a good re-encounter should go.

I saw my daughter’s principal in the bookstore. He was acting just like I’d like my daughter’s principal to be acting: He was engaging anyone and everyone around him in his attempts to remember the name of the book he wanted. And anyone and everyone he engaged didn’t have the foggiest notion of what he was talking about but met his inquiry with just the right amount of proper small-town cheerfulness. And we all expressed joy when he came down the stairs later to proclaim that he had, indeed, figured out the title and author. Expressing joy, that’s how you survive.

I picked up a book by Christopher Hitchens, apparently to counter all the joy in the room. I turned directly to this passage from his book, For the Sake of Argument:

“The real test of a radical or a revolutionary is not the willingness to confront the orthodoxy and arrogance of the rulers but the readiness to contest illusions and falsehoods among close friends and allies.”

Good stuff. It’s just too bad Hitchens is an ass. And I can say that because he doesn’t live in my small town.

I found the new collection of short stories by Lydia Davis, not so cleverly titled “The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis.” Luckily, the title was the least clever thing about the book. Davis is brilliant. Here’s the first story I turned to (Mildred and the Oboe):

Last night Mildred, my neighbor on the floor below, masturbated with an oboe. The oboe wheezed and squealed in her vagina. Mildred groaned. Later, when I thought she was finished, she started screaming. I lay in bed with a book about India. I could feel her pleasure pass up through the floorboards into my room. Of course there might have been another explanation for what I heard. Perhaps it was not the oboe but the player of the oboe who was penetrating Mildred. Or perhaps Mildred was striking her small nervous dog with something slim and musical, like an oboe.

Mildred who screams lives below me. Three young women from Connecticut live above me. Then there is a lady pianist with two daughters on the parlor floor and some lesbians in the basement. I am a sober person, a mother, and I like to go to bed early – but how can I lead a regular life in this building? It is a circus of vaginas leaping and prancing: thirteen vaginas and only one penis, my little son.

Needless to say, I bought the book – happily, just like my small town insists.

That’s how you survive.