Wheeling, WV

I have a schema for small-town American culled from movies and television that activates whenever I come to places like this. You know it: think Fargo, or Stephen King. And...it's unfair, in the way that overgeneralization is always unfair, but it's also powerful: powerful because the stereotype is everything i most hate and fear -- bigotry, parochialism, ignorance. And by association, I don't feel 100% comfortable here*, for no rational reason apart from not being able to see the place in the particular: one town is Every Town. On the surface, it is -- the one-road deal, not quite one traffic light, but not too far off. Kroger's the most impressive building on the street. A clinic run by an Arab M.D. - with a four-foot American flag hanging in the window, and a smaller one above his nameplate on the door.

And the corollary to my discomfort is, I suppose, that I admire people -- foreigners -- who can assimilate into such communities, who can see the particular, because in my experience it's hard enough to deal with Americans' preconceptions of you. Start to destination: tough; meeting halfway: sometimes well-nigh impossible. The specific example of which is -- hats off to the brother for doing that. I certainly couldn't have.

* And not just here: cf. Saluda, SC, and Nowheresville, VA, the name of the town which I no longer even recall.