When my friend Debora heard that I was moving
to Illinois, she took me aside to offer me advice about
Midwesterners. “You can’t expect them to act as
friendly as Southerners,” she said, “but when they are
nice, you’ll know they mean it.”
At the time, her counsel mystified me. I
never thought of Debora as a Midwesterner, and I certainly never
thought of myself as a Southerner. Furthermore, the notion that
there could be any significant cultural differences between the two
seemed absurd.
But I’ve recently discovered
that’s a common blind spot — the tendency to be
completely oblivious to your native culture until you find yourself
without it. You may not necessarily feel homesick, but you start to
notice subtle variations, and at some point you just can’t
keep living in denial. You find yourself staring into a mirror and
rehearsing your little confessional speech: “Hi, my name is
Dusty, and I’m a Texan.”
Debora had that detail wrong. She
shouldn’t have lumped me in with the Southerners. But she
couldn’t be expected to know the difference between Southerners and Texans — being, as
she is, a Midwesterner. See? I’ve now swallowed the whole
culture-clash scenario whole.
My main concern is the children. I’m
too old to change, but my two sons are in their formative years,
and I see them morphing into Midwesterners right before my eyes.
Already they’re asking for oyster crackers to float in their
soup — little alien pastries instead of the proper soup
supplement, crumbled saltines. Clearly I have to figure out what it
all means.
I began by attempting to define the Midwest,
and quickly learned that there is no simple answer. I found a
public-school Web site that outlined the Midwest to include North
and South Dakota, yet my friend Anne, a true Midwesterner, rejects
those states as “up there too far away.” My co-worker
Todd calls himself as a Midwesterner, having grown up in
Pittsburgh. But I found a Grumble magazine article called “Out Loud and Proud:
A Midwesterner’s Story” in which the author, listed
only as Sassafras, insists that anyone who lives in Pittsburgh is
not a Midwesterner but rather a chilly, aloof Easterner.
Turns out it’s easier to define
Midwesterners not as residents of certain states but rather by a
state of mind. Almost everybody I consulted used the word
“earth” to describe Midwesterners, as in
“down-to-earth” or “salt-of-the-earth” type
people, then hastened to clarify that they
didn’t mean “hicks.”
“You might hear the word
‘Midwesterner’ and think of a couple of guys wearing
overalls and straw hats playing country music,” says Richard
Wiegel, founder of a Wisconsin quartet called the Midwesterners,
“but we’re much closer to Chuck Berry style than
anything.”
The other trait almost everybody emphasized
was the Midwestern work ethic. Brandy Agerbeck, the Chicago-based
graphic artist behind loosetooth.com, didn’t realize that she
was a Midwesterner until her work took her to New York and
California.
“On the East Coast, things get done
because of who you know. On the West Coast, things get done because
everyone agrees and feels all right about it. In the Midwest,
things get done because work needs to be done,” she says.
“The Midwest is more of a meritocracy.”
It’s a place with a sterling
reputation. T-shirts.com offers a cute brown ringer tee emblazoned
with a pair of wheat sheaves and the words “WHOLESOME
MIDWESTERN GIRL.”
If there’s a bad connotation to the
term “Midwesterner,” it’s the tradition of
conformity, says my friend Anne, who spent four fun-filled years
living in New York City.
“You need to fit into a mold, or people
give you funny looks — and it’s not just
the Bubbas,” she says of the Midwest.
Anne, who describes herself as “a
Midwesterner, but a weird Midwesterner,” admits that
she’s sensitive because she gets such looks all the time,
like when she goes grocery shopping right after working out at the
gym.
“See, there’s no such thing
as a weird New Yorker, because you can’t find the archetype
that personifies New Yorkers,” she says. “You could
definitely find a set of archetypes that constitute the Midwestern
population — and a lot of people would fit it 100
percent.”
I’ve been in Illinois more than two
years now, and I’ve never been more aware that I’m a
Texan. My editor, a vagabond journalist who has lived everywhere,
lists some unflattering stereotypes of my home state’s
citizens and evaluates me tactfully: “You’ve got a bit
of cowboy in you.”
I don’t feel that I embody all the
flamboyant traits routinely attributed to Texans, just as I
don’t believe that every Springfieldian exudes that heartland
sincerity that Midwesterners are famous for. I’ve crossed
paths with some mean-spirited bullies here. But I’ve also met
some people who, as my friend Debora said, offer friendship in its
most genuine form. If my kids grow up to be that kind of
Midwesterner, I’ll be the happiest Texan in Illinois.
This article appears in Apr 28 – May 4, 2005.
