The term, "urbane", has its roots in the word "urban".
City-like, I suppose, as opposed to country-like.
Nothing in my life or heritage is urbane: nothing!
On my father's side of the family, there are fishermen.
My brothers and I went fishing with our father;
not trout fishing in a Scottish stream, or Colorado, with flies.
We went to Alaska on wooden fishing boats.
Maternally, we inherited hard-scrabble farming.
All of us, brothers and sisters, milked cows by hand.
I have never been an urban person, although
I have lived in Berkeley, Phoenix, Chicago, Oslo,
the Twin Cities, and now Tucson, again.
The hardest years were those I spent in a small town in Iowa,
not because it was Iowa, except that Iowa is itself small town.
I built a log house out in the woods outside of that small town
in order to escape from what makes small towns small:
gossip, conformity, the notion that being religious was
what made good people good, that god was in his heaven,
and that heaven would be a lot like a small town.
Out in those woods, I listened to classical music
and built two log houses according to my own design.
In college, I recognized that what there was of my
course work added up to nothing. All I had was a handful
of chemistry, ancient Greek I did not understand, and
and the kind of requirements church colleges demand
of reprobates who might otherwise die happy.
We were assigned seats for daily chapel,
and students on work-study created a file of empty seats.
I calculated that I could get a degree in sociology
by taking all the courses at once--something like that--
so I became a sociology major. Oddly enough,
it was in a sociology class that met in the balcony
of that chapel, where the students with clip-boards
stood and noted the empty seats at daily chapel,
that I first thought about why cities become refuges
for everything small towns make difficult.
In cities, white people had black friends, sometimes.
Churches were huge in large cities, and attendance was small.
People went to restaurants, made love without shame,
drank cocktails and thought whatever they damned-well-pleased.
People in cities entertained thoughts that did not have
familial approval. There were other people to give approval.
Something like that is happening to our nation.
There is a kind of urban/small town divide.
The small town, and their counties, are shrinking
because the jobs, the education, the restaurants,
the diversity of human population is in the cities.
People who are gay can relax a little bit more in the cities.
It is in the cities, in the coffee houses, in the universities
that people understand that ideas are ideas, to be imagined,
debated, proposed, destroyed, and left on the floor:
they are not eternal truths, divine truths, damnable lies.
They are just ideas, as harmless as humming,
and as potentially life-changing as birth itself.
Cities allow one to wonder whether
what you have always believed is wrong,
and whether what you have never imagined
can become a part of your own story.
Small towns make it hard to imagine that something different
could be at least as good as what you have always known.
It is difficult because the people you love might be wrong.
It isn't really small-town versus the city:
it is yearning for something better, on one hand and,
on the other, fearing that something good will be lost.
You can see it politically.
You feel it, both ways.
City-like, I suppose, as opposed to country-like.
Nothing in my life or heritage is urbane: nothing!
On my father's side of the family, there are fishermen.
My brothers and I went fishing with our father;
not trout fishing in a Scottish stream, or Colorado, with flies.
We went to Alaska on wooden fishing boats.
Maternally, we inherited hard-scrabble farming.
All of us, brothers and sisters, milked cows by hand.
I have never been an urban person, although
I have lived in Berkeley, Phoenix, Chicago, Oslo,
the Twin Cities, and now Tucson, again.
The hardest years were those I spent in a small town in Iowa,
not because it was Iowa, except that Iowa is itself small town.
I built a log house out in the woods outside of that small town
in order to escape from what makes small towns small:
gossip, conformity, the notion that being religious was
what made good people good, that god was in his heaven,
and that heaven would be a lot like a small town.
Out in those woods, I listened to classical music
and built two log houses according to my own design.
In college, I recognized that what there was of my
course work added up to nothing. All I had was a handful
of chemistry, ancient Greek I did not understand, and
and the kind of requirements church colleges demand
of reprobates who might otherwise die happy.
We were assigned seats for daily chapel,
and students on work-study created a file of empty seats.
I calculated that I could get a degree in sociology
by taking all the courses at once--something like that--
so I became a sociology major. Oddly enough,
it was in a sociology class that met in the balcony
of that chapel, where the students with clip-boards
stood and noted the empty seats at daily chapel,
that I first thought about why cities become refuges
for everything small towns make difficult.
In cities, white people had black friends, sometimes.
Churches were huge in large cities, and attendance was small.
People went to restaurants, made love without shame,
drank cocktails and thought whatever they damned-well-pleased.
People in cities entertained thoughts that did not have
familial approval. There were other people to give approval.
* * *
Something like that is happening to our nation.
There is a kind of urban/small town divide.
The small town, and their counties, are shrinking
because the jobs, the education, the restaurants,
the diversity of human population is in the cities.
People who are gay can relax a little bit more in the cities.
It is in the cities, in the coffee houses, in the universities
that people understand that ideas are ideas, to be imagined,
debated, proposed, destroyed, and left on the floor:
they are not eternal truths, divine truths, damnable lies.
They are just ideas, as harmless as humming,
and as potentially life-changing as birth itself.
Cities allow one to wonder whether
what you have always believed is wrong,
and whether what you have never imagined
can become a part of your own story.
Small towns make it hard to imagine that something different
could be at least as good as what you have always known.
It is difficult because the people you love might be wrong.
It isn't really small-town versus the city:
it is yearning for something better, on one hand and,
on the other, fearing that something good will be lost.
You can see it politically.
You feel it, both ways.
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