A Tale From Small Town, USA

I grew up in a small town, and I'm still living there, though I can guarantee that the majority of my readers would never have guessed. Everyone knows everyone, the local newspaper is only 50¢, and (at the risk of making a bad joke), word spreads faster than COVID-19. As of typing this article, I'm currently at one such byproduct called The Taste of Cherokee, a Veteran’s memorial event that's catered by most (if not all), of the restaurants in the county. One thing I have to say about small-town food is that there's none like it.

Come here on a Sunday after church and prove me wrong, I dare you.

Anyway, I could go on and on about good food, but there's more to the scope of this. In a small town, there's a sense of community... Then there’s the author of this article sitting at the table in the back typing on a phone held together by tape. Kudos if you can call me out by that. Still, you feel like you know everyone, and you know just where everything is and who everyone is. Over the course of a few minutes, I quickly found more people I had interacted with in the past than not.

The name “Smalltown, USA” can mean a plethora of things. To Little Billy, it can mean the park he and his friends spend all day playing at. To the mother, it means the Sunday Service. To the father, it means the old dirt road he learned to drive on. Put simply, it means something unique to everyone, tomboy and city-dweller alike. No two people have the same definition because no two people have the same experience.

The song America the Beautiful was played, and I can easily pin this as the best analogy. I play the song slowly and with feeling on the piano, pouring my heart and soul into it. The performer, Chad Steed, played it equally as personal on a guitar. Two people, one story, one piece, two experiences.

While I don’t consider myself to be from Smalltown, USA, there's no doubt that it would be certain that I would have met this place in my lifetime, even briefly. It’s a place where there aren’t any big Hollywood stars, it's a place where people are simply people… And that's okay. Smalltown, USA isn't about needing to know everything and being 100% self-sufficient, it’s a place where help is always close by if you need a dollar or a nice place to lay your head at night.
Sometimes in the modern world, we can forget to slow down and sip the coffee. Most of my time off, I'm treating McDonald's like a trendy Big Apple coffee shop, sipping on a good ten-n-ten (You know it’s good coffee if it needs ten cream/ten sugar to fight the stoutness).

Throughout the evening, I had many revelations and, to my own surprise, a few times tears almost surfaced. Anyone who knows me well enough knows that I don’t generally let the waterworks on unless there’s a big reason- then I excuse myself and hope I didn’t make myself a spectacle. As a measure to hopefully get off of this tangent I am now on, the revelation that stood out to me the most was that, as much as I don’t fit the default image (I prefer that term as opposed to the much-more-familiar stereotype), I am from Smalltown, USA.

Now, on a more serious note:-
To my American readers, both at home and abroad, as we remember Veteran’s day this November, and even as we remember the victims of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in a couple of days, we needn’t forget the brave men and women that gave the ultimate sacrifice in order to make possible what we enjoy today. To anyone who served to protect our land at any point in history, it wouldn’t have been possible without you and what you gave.