Friday 15th January 2010 - My Last Day Here

          My breakfast diner is on the square, and it's warm enough this morning to take a turn round it without my Walmart puffy jacket.  It's a typical American small town.  Americans are just as new to protecting townscapes are we are, so there are several modern bits.  Almost all the premises are active, so they're doing rather better here than most.

[n0744]

 

          I'd been invited to come to band practice at the High School, mainly since they weren't performing any concerts while I was in town.  When I went to check in, the Principal was there, wearing her Musselborough tartan kilt.  I had acquired two "Scottie" ball caps up in Montana, so I thought it fitting to present her with one.

          Once the band were warmed up, they were landed with a new, quite difficult piece, I think just to impress me.  Which it did.

          At the end, one of the young ladies came up to me and said she had been to Glasgow, Montana in the summer, when I was there, and had read about me in the (Montana) local paper.  That seemed to me an extraordinary coincidence.

 

          later that night, the weather having warmed up considerably, everyone was out to wave me goodbye.  I spotted a lady in the bar reading a Kindle (that's Amazon's electronic book).  Since I'm tempted to get one, I thought I would ask for a user review.  She couldn't have praised it more highly.  It's certainly easier than trying to find a bookshop in these small towns (it downloads whole books over the cellphone system).

          She was a New Yorker, down here because this was both cheaper, and rated the best place to live in rural America (in some farmers' magazine in 2007).  But she wasn't adapting too well.  She really expected everyone to shout abuse at her, so she could shout back, for everybody to be touting something.  She seemed a little peeved that I knew more people than she did.

          As the evening wore on, it became clear that she was a classic east-coast liberal.  She probably thought that everyone here had parents who met at a family reunion, and had shot there dinner on the way in.  And, of course, there was no way they were going to trust someone with a yankee accent.  I told her she could explain her accent by saying she had killed her mother with an axe, and spent the last twenty years in a northern prison.  They would probably be marginally more sympathetic.

          I've never been very good at meeting strangers, but , on this trip, I've put myself in a position where it's unavoidable.  I would have thought she had done the same, but she really thought it was their fault she wasn't getting along with them.  I told her she was an incurable New Yorker.  The only thing for it was to go back.  (I also told her that New York was my favourite place in the whole world, which is true, and that cheered her up a bit.)  I wonder if this will ever turn up on her Kindle?