atoms into suns

There's an article in the LA Times about the town of Monowi, Nebraska, population 1, and its library. (Found on boing boing.)

Presumably this little town is so interesting because it's just so incomprehensible to those writing about it. (I have good evidence that anything between the Arizona line and the Hudson River is inscrutible to most LA residents, but that's another story.) But reading the article gave me all sorts of warm little feelings of home.

I grew up in a town of 1500 or so in North Dakota -- a metropolis, really -- but there are little towns not much bigger than Monowi all over ND. Just up the road is a little town that consists of a few houses, a grain elevator, store, and bar. My great uncle and aunt owned the store and bar, which are right next to each other. Just outside were gas pumps that haven't been used in decades. In addition to being the store proprietor and bartender, my great uncle was the constable, postmaster, and probably a zillion other things, too. The store is smaller than most modern convenience stores. The post office is a roughly 3x3 foot room in the corner of the store, complete with Wanted posters on the wall. I remember staring at all those posters as a kid, wondering what Interstate Flight was and checking out the fingerprints.

Living in a small town, you get used to the idea of extended family. Only a couple generations ago it was common to have 10 kids in a family, which makes for lots of cousins down the line. Seemed like each time I met someone new my mom would explain to me how we were related. "Your great-grandpa's brother Billy had a son named Jack, who married Helen, and they had six kids. Two of them died of scarlet fever when they were pretty little, and then Helen died and Jack married Martha and they had five more kids. Jack and Helen's included Frank, who married Frances, and they had..." You get the picture. Before I got married I asked my mom several times -- partly in jest, partly seriously -- if she was absolutely sure Bill and I weren't related somehow. (No, we're not.)

Whenever we'd get everyone together for a family reunion or wedding or somesuch, we'd often all naturally congregate in the bar. Everyone could have their drinks and socialize, there was plenty of room for everyone, you could stay as long as you wanted, and the kids could be right there, playing with all their cousins.

Between the two towns were my grandparents' farm and the farms of all those great-uncles and great-great-uncles -- another part of the family history to remember. Each time we'd drive down a gravel road we'd get the story of which of our ancestors used to live there, who lived there now, and more bits of family history. Not far from the farm was the one-room schoolhouse my dad went to and the church where a lot of family events took place. I think we spent as much time in the basement of that church as we did in our own. We had lots of great times racing around between gravestones and church pews with cousins, too.

The article's description of the library itself, though, reminds me of my grade school library.

The radio station bit was spot on, too. There were only a few radio stations around, none of them geared toward the high-schooler demographic. We listened to KFYR a lot. I got a wakeup call -- broadcast to five states and two Canadian provinces -- from the KFYR morning guys on my birthday during my freshman year of college. (That was before the station was bought by Clear Channel and turned into a right-wing talk-radio unbearable spewfest.)

I'm not really that old, but reminiscing like this makes me feel like I belong more to my grandparents' generation than my own. My peers in other parts of the country went to high schools like those in John Hughes movies. I went to a grade school with probably just over 100 students in the whole place and played kick the bucket and cowboys and Indians with neighborhood kids. In another bar in another tiny town, I remember watching Zorro on TV while my parents socialized. What time warp was I living in?