Country mouse, city mouse

"We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity."


It's been almost two years since a certain once-VP hopeful spoke those words during a speech. At the time, that rankled me - even though I was (and let's be honest, still am) "small town folk." But today, I want to return to those words to share with you an anecdote that contradicts this "Small town folk = good, city folk = bad" mentality.

Dave came down to Brooklyn on Friday for a Sondre Lerche concert in Greenpoint. We had to take the J train to Lorimer Street, walk a couple blocks to the G train, and take that to Greenpoint Avenue.

As we walked down the stairs to the platform for the G train, we noticed a sort of peculiar scene. There was a young man standing on our side of the platform. He looked to be about our age. The way he was dressed, he looked like he had just come from a run or a workout. On the opposite platform were a teenage girl and a little boy, probably about eight or nine years old. Dave and I guessed that they were brother and sister.

The boy was visibly distraught, his face scrunched up into painful contortions, tears flowing freely. His sister was trying to comfort him, to little avail. The man on our side of the platform waved to him, trying to cheer him up. "It's gonna be OK, man!" he said. But the boy continued to cry.

Without much prompting, the young man ran up the stairs and reappeared on the other side of the platform, alongside the girl and boy. He dropped to the ground and pressed his ear against the edge of the platform, listening. Then, he leapt down from the platform and grabbed a small action figure that was lying near the train tracks. Evidently, the boy had dropped it, the source of his anguish.

When the man leapt back up onto the platform and handed the toy back to the boy, his face lit up. The tears evaporated, and he smiled. The man walked back up the stairs and returned to our side of the platform. Dave and I chatted with him for a bit before we went our separate ways. He introduced himself as Aku (I probably spelled that wrong) and said he saw the whole scene unfold. He had never jumped down onto the tracks like that before, and he described how his heart was pounding as he did it.

None of this is to say that people in small towns suck, though some people sure like to strongly imply it for political reasons. Underlying it is the suggestion that, if we grow good people in our small towns, then what kind of people do we grow in our big cities? Or anything in between? The point is, it's stupid to put people into boxes like "Good" or "Bad" according to their origins and not their actions.

I miss Connecticut, but New York is OK.