Lady Gaga Doesn't Live Here

Where I live, we don't travel in these, we eat them.

I was born and raised in Havre de Grace, a small town in Maryland that has more letters in its name than people in its zip code.  How small was it?  Small enough that it would qualify for its own "Sa-Lute!" if Hee Haw was still on the air.  The town was never actually featured on the 1970's TV show, which is a shame, because it would have been worth the price of admission just to hear Junior Samples or Grandpa Jones try to pronounce "Havre de Grace."

For cultured, educated people, the town's correct pronunciation is "Hov de grah."  For those of us who actually lived there, it was pronounced "Havver dee Grayce."  And for the rest of the country, it's pronounced "that little town next to Aberdeen."

Havre de Grace is French for "harbor of beauty."  It was named by General Lafayette during the American Revolution, a charismatic military man who was best known for having a first name that was too long to fit on any of the statues in this country honoring him.  He was also famous because he and George Washington slept together during the war, back before "don't ask, don't tell." I make this statement because in my hometown there were plaques all over the place that said "Washington slept here" and "Lafayette slept here."  It's easy to read between the lines, even without an 18th century version of TMZ explaining it to us.

I left Havre de Grace as soon as I was old enough to figure out what the "D" stood for on a Ford Pinto gearshift.  It's not that there was anything wrong with the town, it's just that I longed for life in a warmer climate, and in a place big enough to have its own Walmart.

The largest store in Havre de Grace back then was the Acme supermarket.  You're not going to believe this, but I used to shop there every week, and was never able to find a single rocket, pair of roller skates, super-sized rubber bands for Y-shaped cacti, or any of the other cool gadgets bearing the Acme brand in Road Runner cartoons. 

So I moved to one of the larger cities in Florida.

No, not Miami.  Not Orlando, either.  Not that Tampa place.  Okay, not Jacksonville, Gainesville, or Tallahassee.

It was that OTHER large Florida city no one ever remembers called Fort Myers.

Located on the Gulf coast, the city is best known for not having a fort of any kind.  For the record, it doesn't have an inordinate concentration of families named "Myers," either. 

After living there for 16 years, my family and I moved on to St. George, a mid-sized city in Utah.  It's not a coincidence that the state is a four-letter word.  To this day, when my wife gets mad enough at me, she tells me to go Utah myself.

Eventually, we wound up in Mesquite, Nevada.  You want an example of how ironic life can be?  Mesquite is just about the same size as Havre de Grace, except with no water.  Plenty of sand for a beach, but no water.  Mesquite also has a noticeable absence of any season except summer.

However, to its credit, Mesquite does have a Walmart.

When I was young, I couldn't wait to get out of the small town where I lived.  Now that I've hit the half-century mark, I don't want to live anywhere except a small town.

I've come to realize that I'm simply not mentally unbalanced enough to live in a big city.  Believe me, I've tried to be, but have consistently fallen short.

For example, if you showed up in my town wearing a dress made of veal cutlets, or arrived on the boulevard in a translucent egg, my neighbors would waste no time in calling 911 and reporting that one of the beds at the state mental hospital is probably missing an occupant, or another Area 51 escapee is in town. That is, as soon as my neighbors stopped laughing, and maybe took a couple of hits from their supply of O₂. 

Hearing the visitor emerge from the egg singing "rah rah, ooh la la, roma ro ma ma" wouldn't help her cause any.

We would describe her as "gaga," accompanied with the hand gesture of a finger circling the air near our right temple.

In the big city, they would give the escapee a record contract, a few kazillion dollars, and the title of "Lady."

That's not to say that I live in Mayberry, the offensive caricature usually hung on small towns by those who dwell in square apartment buildings crammed with about two dozen humans per square foot.  We have just as much graft, corruption, political backbiting, and scandal as our big-city brethren, thank you very much.  The only difference is that urbanites probably aren't going to run into Mayor Bloomberg shopping for eggs at the Walmart on a Sunday evening. 

I'm also going to make the boast that, while small town residents may not be as sophisticated, I'll stack up our collective IQ's against those in any metropolitan community in America.

For example, if someone spray paints weird multi-colored symbols and unintelligible words on one of our bridges, we're going to call Billy over at City Hall and have him remove the graffiti (which he'll do in less than two days).  We're not going to throw up our hands, offer pithy critiques, and refer to it haughtily as "art" (unless, of course, the bridge happens to be another Nevada Department of Transportation project).

I like living in a small town where good sense is still in style, and holey see-through clothing isn't.