What it Takes to Make it in a Small Town

My friend Gary Cort, the former artist in 3 Rivers, recently had a visit from a new resident in town.

He asked Gary, “What does it take to make it in a small town?”

Gary, who has lived here for over 30 years and has done many jobs during that time, told him: “You have to be humble. You have to be willing to accept anything that comes your way, no matter how small or menial. And you have to be able to accept insults from people without getting too upset.”

As a former artist, Gary is an expert at this.

Gary’s advice was about work, but I think he was also talking about life in a small town in general. It’s really not as easy as it seems living in a small town. Everybody gets to know everybody so well here. Gary says that whenever he goes out at night on the weekends to the local bar, that he sees too many people who he knows way too many things about.

“I try to pretend I don’t know those things about those people, so they can have a clean slate—at least for that night,” Gary says.

I think that’s pretty generous of Gary. In Three Rivers, everyone has a record. I’m not talking about a criminal police record—(although many people here have those, too.) I’m talking about a “past.” Everyone here has a “past.” And even for those people who don’t have a past, they can rest assured that they have a “future” which will ultimately result in a “past,” which could at some point, cause problems down the road.

It took me a while to realize this when I first moved here. When I used to meet people, sometimes they would say, “You’re Lisa Lieberman? I’ve heard about you.”

I’d smile and say, “What have you heard?”

Then, I’d notice the looks on their faces change and I’d stop smiling.

After a while, I learned to stop asking. These days, if someone I meet tells me they know who I am, I tell them I’d rather not know what they know.

Everyone makes mistakes. The only difference in a small town is that everyone’s mistakes are visible to everyone else. It’s a little bit like floating around in a small fish bowl of water that never gets changed.

And sometimes your mistakes have far reaching effects, much further than you would have ever realized when you were making the original mistake. I thought about this the other day when I was at a restaurant with a few friends of mine and spotted a guy who I had taken a recent interest in. Unfortunately, this guy was sitting next to someone who I had offended not too long ago—although one could say that this guy had offended me first. I went home and called my best friend in 3 Rivers to ask her what the implications of this might be.

My friend said, “Don’t worry about what the other guy says about you. If a guy thinks a girl is hot, he’s not going to care what anyone says about her. But, if he’s only halfway interested, then what someone else says could change his mind about her.”

“Maybe I should apologize to the guy I offended,” I said.

“Only if you feel you’ve done something wrong,” my friend said. “Don’t do it just because you’re interested in this one guy.”

“I wouldn’t be doing it just for this one guy I’m interested in,” I said. “I’d be doing it for all other future guys I might be interested in who might be influenced by what this one person has to say about me.”

I hung up the phone, and thought the problem through and in the end decided to do nothing, which is often the best solution for most problems. There was, after all, always the remote chance that the guy I offended would apologize to me for having offended me first—in case he was worried about what I might say about him.

(Readers can e-mail Lisa at lisal@thegrid.net.)