The Poosey Digest: Peculiarities of small town living

Greetings from the Ridge.

It’s 8:10 a.m. as I write this and I didn’t even look at my watch. Bob Blevins drove by the house taking his Ford pickup around town to "check things," as he puts it. He always passes the house at 8:10 a.m. If the roads are really slick or his kidney stones are acting up it might be 8:11 or 8:12 before he makes it, but sleet and stones aside, he will make it.

We used to call this sort of information nosiness, neighborliness, or the peculiarities of small town living. Now we call it "social networking."

Facebook, My Space, and the dozen or so other sites devoted to personal disclosure and staying in touch assume they have invented a new way for folks to establish a sense of community. Anybody with a memory knows that we’re just returning to our roots.

As our population moves in increasing numbers to urban areas while the small towns and farming communities continue to dwindle, we’ve lost our ability to connect with our neighbors. Facebook and its ilk think they’ve discovered the Holy Grail of communication when all they’ve really done is reinvent Grandma’s party line.

There was little to hide in small towns. Even your underwear hung on the clothesline for everyone to see. What do you have left to hide when your ragged boxers are flapping in the wind?

You didn’t have to announce to the world that you were ailing. If you didn’t show up for lodge, church, or coffee folks sent out a get well card. If you missed the big three for two weeks in a row you got flowers. Go AWOL for three weeks and we’d start lining up pallbearers.

We didn’t need Facebook to know what our friends were doing. Thursday was auction day and every pickup headed east on a Thursday morning Main Street was headed to the sale barn. If they had a sow in the back of the truck they were selling, no sow and they were looking. If they were in the family car then they were just going to chat.

You didn’t call lodge members on Monday nights, American Legionnaires on Thursday or Baptists on Wednesdays. No need to post your goings and comings on My Space. We knew where you were going and when you’d be coming back.

Some Facebook-ers are so starved for attention that they actually post what they eat. Again, nothing more than a return to our rural routes. If you made the local café your lunch spot then you ate the special of the day. Everybody ate the special. We were highly suspicious of anyone who’d actually order off the menu, and the special varied little from week to week. Nothing was a surer guarantee of making the cook mad than ordering a cheeseburger when she’d worked since five that morning preparing chicken and noodles. Besides, if you tended toward the corpulent side of the scales and wore bib overalls we knew what you had for lunch anyway.

My Space and Facebook brag about the "innovation" of being able to send back pictures from your vacation while you’re still in the Rockies. Again, their boast lags 60 years behind the small town postmaster who would read your traveling postcards and keep the town informed as to your whereabouts.

Lots of folks use Facebook to post how they’re feeling. Grandma just looked you in the face. In a small town we not only knew your moods but could make a pretty accurate guess as to what caused them.

And, like small town living, anyone so foolish as to announce private matters on Facebook deserves the trouble they get. I still marvel at someone who will put the intimate details of his life on a social network accessible to a billion viewers then be mortified that anyone found out. In the small community of yesteryear you kept your mouth shut about the pregnancy, the alcoholic aunt, and the weird uncle. Technology may have brought us full circle to the joys of community, but they’ve yet to design a website that downloads good sense.

You ever in Poosey, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.