It comes up at dinner parties and with people that are recent acquaintances. It comes up too frequently I’m thinking. Partly, having grown up in a tiny town with a name so quaint and silly it always first stops and then fuels the traffic of conversation, I have found it useful. It wasn’t always like that though. When you are a child and the name of where you live is the only name you have ever known, it does not sound strange. It is not funny to anyone there for sure. Not once when I was growing up do I remember anyone in town suggesting that the name of our little burg was stupid. To think it odd would have meant knowing there was something outside, something different, but what was outside barely existed for us. True trucks went right through town on the highway, and the train dropped off mail as it roared through several times a day, but had little effect. The sense of a vibrating, curious life form, however, that questioned and joked and remade things into something different and unrecognizable was beyond us.
I was coloring inside the lines and getting pats on the head for it. I could make my own well-shaped lines before I colored too. There is proof of that in drawings I made of elephants when I was four that still exist. Then that Life magazine arrived at my aunt’s. In the pages of that issue were the pictures of the paintings of DeKooning and Jackson Pollock. DeKooning’s massive, aggressive; indescribably exciting pictures of women ripped my world open. And Pollock’s drip painting that terrified parents around America swore their children could do (I knew they couldn’t) made my eyes spin. My childhood did not end with that issue of Life magazine but my imagination from then on would never be bound by the borders of that small, safe town whose name I count on to produce a smile when conversations sag.