Midwestern Boy

When I was in junior high, I was trying to figure out who I was. Isn’t that what every kid is doing in junior high? I looked around at my friends and all their lives seemed more exciting than mine did.

Lots of kids were dealing with their parents’ divorces; some kids had lots of money or knew someone famous. Everybody else seemed to have a more interesting life than mine. Mine was just too boring, too "Leave it to Beaver." I had both parents, they worked hard to make sure we had clothes and food and they loved us. We lived in a ranch house in the suburbs where my brother and I had paper routes. Boring-ville.

When I was in junior high in Phoenix, the Black kids had a culture; the Mexican kids had a heritage and a culture and great food. American Indian kids had all that and cool pow-wows and costumes and stuff. The Italian kids had great cooking and style.

I felt left out. I thought that White Anglo Saxon Protestant lower-middle class suburbia was boring. If only we were rich or poor or members of some oppressed minority group. Drama, passion, contrast. Could you imagine? Envying hardship. Other kids turned to teenaged angst, punk rock and pot. I turned east.

Hardly anyone in Phoenix is from Phoenix. My parents had left the Detroit area in 1968. Now there’s drama, it just took years and college classes about recent history for me to see it. They wanted a better life for us. Better weather, better economic conditions, and away from all the racial tension and political unrest that Detroit had come to symbolize.

What it meant for me was that I could say I was (sort of) from the Midwest. Suddenly I had a sense of identity. I had a culture, even if it was kind of bland. The summers we spent in Michigan I was introduced to such foreign, exotic and romantic things as twilight, casseroles home made pies, fishing, and Jell-O salads.

Then I stumbled upon a radio show that was all about my newly chosen ethnicity. Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" on National Public Radio. I’d savor it the way I imagine Eastern Europeans under Soviet oppression savored the Voice or Democracy on Radio Free Europe.

Keillor's self-effacing humor focused on what’s funny about the mundane. Like how the front-row for Lutherans is five or six rows back. Or his "Young Lutheran’s Guide to the Orchestra:"

"Many Lutherans start out playing clarinets in marching band and think of it as a pretty good instrument and kind of sociable…But the symphonic clarinet is different: clever, sarcastic, kind of snooty. It's a nice small town instrument that went to college and after that you can't get a simple answer out of them. It _is_ a French instrument, you know. Ever wonder why there are no French Lutherans? Probably the wine wasn't good enough for them."

I thought this was great stuff, especially since I played the clarinet in junior high and hated it. All the cool kids played trumpet or drums. But my older brother had played clarinet, so I played clarinet. Keillor made it okay, I was humble, it’s good to be humble, learn to laugh at yourself.

Who knew? I went to Concordia College in Nebraska because of their great art program, because they offered me a scholarship, and because it was far away from home.

Junior year of high school on the plane to Journalism Workshop at Ball State University in Indiana, kids from all over the country assumed I was from Chicago. When they found out I was from Phoenix, they’d look at me funny. Too heavy, too short, too pale, too not-blonde.

Then there was the one about the Art Major and the farmer’s daughter. Just that he married her, no joke. So, that’s how I became a Midwesterner, I married into it. Kids at Boyer Valley are always asking why anyone would want to choose to live in rural Iowa. They want nothing more then to get the heck out of their one-horse town.

I tell them that I lived in the second largest city in America for the better part of a decade and I’d much rather live in a village than a megalopolis. Sure, we still have crime, and drugs, and poverty, but I never had dinner with my state representative in LA, I never knew my postmaster by name. I never talked to the LA County Sheriff about being a fellow church youth counselor.

This is a good place to live and a good place to be from. You can say, ‘I’m an Iowan’ and not be ashamed, it may not seem as exotic as being an Ethiopian, but why be jealous of hardship? Why not appreciate your roots and how blessed you are to be from the heartland?