City Mouse, Country Mouse

I chopped off all my hair recently, partly to foil the wood ticks (the down-side of our south-40 walking trail), and partly to prove to myself that I’m still a sophisticated, unflappable, urbane city girl. I mean, I grew up in Omaha, right? I went to three different high schools….I slept in the grass at Memorial Park amid all-night rallies or parties…I took city busses through the projects to get to the downtown bank where I worked…I zoomed around in my 1971 VW bug (with a moon roof and maple leaves airbrushed on the hood…suh-weet) like a NASCAR queen...I was car-hopping at A & W the night the pimp in the orange and green suit drove through the plate glass storefront, for Pete's sake.

But I don’t think my haircut's fooling anyone, least of all me. Last weekend, when Ray and I took a road trip to Minneapolis/St. Paul to hang for a couple of days with Ray’s son, it became instantly clear that we’re now almost completely pasture-ized (not to be corn-fused with pasteurized, which involves boiling, and which, on summer prairie days, might also fit).

Because we now live by the moon & stars here on the Row, making us constitutionally unable to hurry, we ambled up county and state highways and crawled onto the Cities beltway at rush hour on Friday. Oh. Dear. God. I’m pretty sure we both stopped breathing several times. By the time we made it to the hotel parking lot, we both needed (a) a cigarette; (b) a shot of whisky; and (c) a defibrillator. Then, as soon as we checked in and dropped off our stuff, it was time to back onto the deathway…er…beltway to go to Jesse’s. My hands remain white and curved, claw-like, as if still gripping a car doorframe.

Another sign of my de-citification? As we ran hither & yon around the Cities for the next couple of days, I realized that the quirky fashion statements I made in my youth have devolved into barely audible, mostly beige, whispers. I am a pasty prairie wallflower compared to the City-folk and their penchant for le couture horreur. Like the middle-aged man with the bad bleach-blonde perm and the seriously skin-tight hotpants and cowboy boots (and that was ALL he had on), or the boy with the dreads and the tea saucers in his ear lobes, or the guy dressed like Jack Sparrow for no apparent reason, or the girl in all yellow except for her purple tights, into which she’d torn several large holes (prairie people are too steeped in Lutheran/Catholic guilt to intentionally damage something). I even caught myself, for a split second, trying to figure out what sort of fashion statement the clerk in the Tibet Shop was making – the Tibetan monk clerk.

Ray and I also discovered that we’re not so much countrified as we are country-fried. But one can eat out in the city every night with nary a meal that’s chicken-fried, breaded & boiled in oil, super-sized or slathered in mayo. In the big city, we indulged Cuban grilled plantain with black beans and rice; Mexican tacos al pastor and horchata; Thai som dtam salad and green curry chicken; and Chinese noodle and bok choy soup. I loaded up on supplies at United Noodle, a huge Asian market, which will henceforth be known as The United Church of the Divine Noodle, and where I will worship each time I go to the Cities.

I might have been feeling just a twinge of my old city instincts by the time we had to head back home. But a sure sign of our progressive prairieness was our collective sigh pulling into the Row yard, with peacocks trumpeting, dandelions exploding, and that beautiful prairie darkness (except for the gazillion solar lights in our gardens). So I’m glad to be home again. I’m almost done knitting another pair of fingerless gloves, and today I’m tattooing my gnarled hands with henna, then later this afternoon I’ll sip wine on the patio to set the henna in the sun while I watch the peas’ courtship shenanigans, listen to the orioles, and toss a tennis ball for the dogs. Something about the bustle, flashes of color, and anonymity of the city still calls to me, but gimme a straw hat and call me Flannery…the city just can’t beat this calm, this space, this hermitage. Home again, home again, jiggity jig.