Discoveries

I have mentioned on my long bicycle trips, which visited small towns like this one, that I generally withheld the fact that I’m from California. “Oh, the Land of Fruit and Nuts,” they would say and laugh. From that point in a budding conversation, I would become part of “that” culture, and charged accordingly. To avoid ostracism, I learned a version of strategy used by Berlin women as the Russians defeated their city and took them in 1945. They disfigured themselves to avoid rape and contrived all sorts of protective stories. Californian women in Midwest small towns are not generally raped, but they are often marked as undesirable. So, my stories of origin evolved like a prey species evolves against predators, and I strove to be understood as a decent person before I revealed my home.

But here, that has not been their reaction, not with the twenty or so people who know my home. They console me on having no seasons, or complain about the traffic I choose to endure, but the stigma of weirdness as inherent fate that all Californians, is not immediately applied to me, and I find it pleasantly odd.

You remember the slovenly man who disrupted the Zion Lutheran Church service last Sunday, and the round table of pundits, sitting with coffee and snacks after the service, concluding that “all kinds are welcome here.” In like manner, at today’s round table, the lesbian teen is deemed welcome, and the autistic one who brings her “guys,” which are really stuffed animals, sits happily at the next table. A visitor from California, who asks if she can join them for a few weeks, is ushered right in. And tomorrow she will return for the annual Christmas party.

The picture above shows the stretchy coils of wire that slip easily onto my boots. Walking on packed snow and apparent ice feels as stable as walking on dry pavement. They and the people I’ve met here have added greatly to my happiness, and I did not know they exist.