I once lived in a place so fresh that people
could express their pride in residency simply by the way they put
their renewal stickers on their license plates. Most motorists
placed them properly, inside that rectangular dimple on the
license’s upper right-hand corner, smack on top of last
year’s tag. But others refused to cover the previous sticker
and placed subsequent years’ anywhere they could — some
in careful grid formations, some higgledy-piggledy around the metal
plate.
That was Alaska, where almost everybody was
an immigrant from Outside, which is what Alaskans call the rest of
the United States (only tourists use the term Lower 48).
Anyone who arrived pre-pipeline boom could
call themselves a Sourdough, but even that indicated only a few
decades investment. Still, each and every year of living in Alaska
was a feat. It meant you had survived a dark and frigid winter, an
intoxicatingly sunny but impossibly short summer, a few
spine-tingling encounters with at least moose if not bear, losing
your keys for as much as six months if you happened to drop them
while shoveling your driveway, and, worst of all, the embarrassment of
announcing your actual weight to a bush pilot and a half dozen other
passengers waiting to board his plane. For all this, some people
apparently felt they deserved a merit badge, and the license plate
renewal tag was as close as they could get.
Telling you about Alaska’s low
threshold for tenure takes courage, because even as I type, I hear
you snickering. Who could take such perverse pride in living any
place so few years? That’s nothing — a blip! — by
Springfield standards, where our current mayor campaigned on a
platform touting his family’s five-generation history here,
and a promise that his clan would remain in Springfield eternally.
My point is not to judge whether such pride
is warranted or reasonable; it’s just the feature that
defines Springfield for me — this steadfast, burning,
self-satisfaction, this blithe contentment with the way things are
and always have been forever and ever amen. It’s an attitude
I haven’t encountered anywhere else I’ve lived
(don’t make me give you the whole list), and it fascinates
me. I can’t quite figure out whether it’s purely
wholesome self-esteem, or some kind of regional arrogance. Maybe
both?
See, as this is our annual “Best Of”
issue, I wanted to dedicate my column to all the best things about
Springfield. I was going to write about the awe-inspiring beauty of the
“new” state Capitol, and the humbling power of the old. The
neighborhood streets lined with the kind of majestic trees that take a
century to mature. The way the lagoon at Lincoln Park looks at sunrise
just after a snow.
But almost everything deep I thought about
— Springfield’s intense civic pride, for example
— had a darker flip side that made me wonder: Is this a
“best” thing or a “worst” thing?
Take, for example, the tight warp and woof
that forms the fabric of this community. It’s populous enough
to resemble a small city. Yet I’ve realized I can’t go
anywhere without bumping into someone I know or someone who knows
me. I call these “Springfield moments,” and some are more fun than others. I’ve run into
high-ranking city officials taking their kids to the same classes I
take my kids to. I used to routinely see one notorious powerbroker at
Sunday breakfast, and he got to hear my toddler experimenting loudly
with words I swear he picked up at daycare. I live across the street
from the State Journal-Register’s investigative reporter, and she has seen me dash
outside to grab something from my van wearing just my pajamas. Last
week, I was getting my hair cut when a cop who has been the subject of
a couple of unflattering articles showed up to get his crew cut
trimmed.
Here’s a classic: I made an appointment
with an accountant to get my family’s taxes done. He asked
who had done our taxes before, and I told him it was someone so
incompetent they didn’t even get our Social Security numbers
right. When we met for the appointment, he looked at our previous
tax return and said, “Oh, this was done by my [extremely
close relative].”
Being a glass-is-half-full kinda girl,
I’ve decided this Springfield Syndrome is a
“best,” not a “worst” thing. This frequent,
spontaneous, unavoidable interaction with people I’ve written
about has two benefits. It keeps me honest, and it forces me to see
them as human beings. Hopefully, it has the same effect on them.
This article appears in Sep 15-21, 2005.
