I’ve always wondered, when does a town become a city? Is there a magic number like 10,000 or 100,000? I may not know when a town becomes a city but I darn sure know when I’m in one. I start getting the heebie-jeebies at anything over 30,000 people and I left San Diego one time at three a.m. because I couldn’t take it any longer. I don’t know if it’s the noise or the way that people like to congregate in crowds. You’ve probably heard the phrase, “A New York Minute?” That’s how long I can stand to be in the big bad apple.
I was born in a “hospital” with three or four beds in the town I was raised in. The sign at the edge of town said we were the “Citrus Capital of the World” and that the population was 10,000, both of which were out and out lies. They must have been counting the influx of braceros who came to pick our fruit every year.
We lived at the edge of town on one acre and the street in front of our house was the city limits. Speed one way going down the street and a policeman would give you a ticket and on the other side it would be a sheriff. We had a volunteer fire department where both my grandfather and great-grandfather were the chief. My great-grandfather was even Mayor but that was based solely on the fact that he gave out huge six inch Milky Way bars to young kids on Halloween who grew up to become voters. The train went through our town but it didn’t stop unless it hit a car or a cow. We did have a motel but it had threadbare carpet, cardboard walls and the occasional mouse.
For every year but a couple I’ve lived in small towns and from that experience I’ve learned that there are many things you won’t find in a typical town. For instance, I’ve lived at my current residence for 40 years and in all that time we’ve never had parking meters, one way streets, a metro area, a high school, neither a new or used car lot, a mortician, dermatologist, an Olive Garden nor any other chain restaurant. But we do have a great Mexican food joint that serves our needs quite nicely. We don’t have a museum or a mausoleum or a place to buy clothes except the hardware store. We did have a barber shortage until recently when a brave soul opened one. And our church-to-bar ratio is about one to one, which seems to be the standard against which all towns are measured. My mom went to church while my father hung out in bars.
I got a cowboy job straight out of college and lived outside one of my favorite burgs that I loved because it had about three cows for every permanent resident. It would have been what you call a “one stoplight town” except it didn’t have one. It did have a small grocery store, a cemetery but no hospital or urgent care, (which might explain the need for a cemetery). It’s never had a Starbucks but it did have a laundromat where I could wash my cowy clothes and pity the person who came after me. You could order a pizza from Dominos but it would take an hour to get your pizza, which was about the same time it took for an ambulance to arrive. The town still doesn’t have a Subway, either the kind you ride or order a sandwich. It doesn’t have an airport or a single skyscraper and the only elevator in town is the kind that holds grain, not suits holding briefcases.
In my opinion there are a few minimum necessities to even be called a town. You should have at least one gas station that sells both gas and diesel, a drugstore where you can fill a prescription and at least one bank preferably with the words “Mechanics” or “Farmers” in its name. It should also have a 4-H group and some folks who know what the letters FFA used to stand for.
If you live someplace with absolutely none of these symptoms of civilization you reside in either the country or in Heaven… but I repeat myself.
