makin for a tough target
Purely anecdotal data suggests the neighborhood is becoming browner.
On the walk back from the library, I happened across an Indian man in shirtsleeves, a light purple tie (elegantly knotted), and a winter jacket. Over the summer, South Asian children composed much of the traffic I noted while I studied there, and occasionally, while perambulating, I'll notice a few families of hue darker than what attended my growing up here.
Newington is a tiny town. Reliably blue come election season, but the gun store next to the Chinese restaurant on Constitution Square has been in business for as long as I remember. Our neighbor across the street, who has been a mainstay in our family for quite some time and has watched us grow up and who has been invaluable in helping our family out with everything from home-cooked meals to upkeep on the property when neither me nor my brother were around or willing, is an avid Trump supporter.
This town is largely white and largely aging, which is perhaps why the sight of newly arrived South Asian families has been so startling. And so pleasant. It provides an answer to questions I've often asked the youngest. Most residents our age have moved out, eager to leave what I imagine to them was a suffocating place. You go to Newington High, then you head about fifteen, twenty minutes away to Southern Connecticut State University, and maybe you make a life for yourself in neighboring New Britain. Maybe you migrate to Windsor. But there is and has always been, since we moved here in '98, the exodus.
The heroin epidemic that currently ravaging much of the Northeast, particularly rustic, small-town New England, has skipped us by, and I wonder if the plague hasn't it caught simply because there is no longer anyone around for it to latch onto. The jobless here are invisible. The library is more a place of refuge than any sort of hub of job-searching activity, as it very likely is in other places, and those that haven't yet retired, it seems, are nearing the sunset period.
Nature abhors a vacuum. It was only a matter of time before others discovered this idyll nestled quietly and unobtrusively between New Britain and Hartford. It is anyone's guess what this place will look like in 10 years. Hell, in 5.
This isn't the only locale like it. I wonder if the dynamic is unique to New England. Aging, politically blue and largely white, unlike in many ways from their Midwestern counterparts but alike in so many more ways. No illusions of agrarian lifestyle here, but maybe head a little bit north on I-91 and in Massachusetts maybe the cobblestones speak of some of the same racially fraught history. It is still, however, the North.
This type of place doesn't get written about; at least, not where I can see. Even where cosmopolitan publications whose articles normally blanket my Newsfeed and Facebook wall write about small-town America, the perception is limited largely to the derisively-dubbed flyover country or the South or the Southwest, blood-red political communities. If small-town New England has been written about of late, it has been to discuss our newly acquired opiate crisis, with a nota bene for how hypocritical it is for both the governmental and social response to be of such a different tenor as what has faced communities of color held in the thrall of heroin.
I attended none of the local schools here. Most of my contact has been with the lovely older women who work at the library and the folks largely from New Britain who work at the spa on the other side of the gun store from the Chinese restaurant. Them and the black lady who I see sometimes behind the counter at the post-office. This is my permanent address on paper. But since my return from Paris, I've been bitten by the desire to learn this country more and occasionally dreams of cross-country road trips and ambling train rides and odysseys-by-bus will steam between my ears and behind my eyes. Yesterday, though, a pang of desire shot through my heart regarding this small town. I wanted to learn it more. And not remain within the bubble of my comfortable, circumscribed experience of it.
It is transforming. I don't know that the things I love about it are leaving, and I don't know that things I will love about it are arriving. But for once in my life, getting older hasn't made me less kind to change.
There is no real point to this rambling; it is only the product of my recent attempt at clearing my head after disastrous practice question sets by taking walks in temperatures below freezing. And it seemed worth the time it took to write it down.
On the walk back from the library, I happened across an Indian man in shirtsleeves, a light purple tie (elegantly knotted), and a winter jacket. Over the summer, South Asian children composed much of the traffic I noted while I studied there, and occasionally, while perambulating, I'll notice a few families of hue darker than what attended my growing up here.
Newington is a tiny town. Reliably blue come election season, but the gun store next to the Chinese restaurant on Constitution Square has been in business for as long as I remember. Our neighbor across the street, who has been a mainstay in our family for quite some time and has watched us grow up and who has been invaluable in helping our family out with everything from home-cooked meals to upkeep on the property when neither me nor my brother were around or willing, is an avid Trump supporter.
This town is largely white and largely aging, which is perhaps why the sight of newly arrived South Asian families has been so startling. And so pleasant. It provides an answer to questions I've often asked the youngest. Most residents our age have moved out, eager to leave what I imagine to them was a suffocating place. You go to Newington High, then you head about fifteen, twenty minutes away to Southern Connecticut State University, and maybe you make a life for yourself in neighboring New Britain. Maybe you migrate to Windsor. But there is and has always been, since we moved here in '98, the exodus.
The heroin epidemic that currently ravaging much of the Northeast, particularly rustic, small-town New England, has skipped us by, and I wonder if the plague hasn't it caught simply because there is no longer anyone around for it to latch onto. The jobless here are invisible. The library is more a place of refuge than any sort of hub of job-searching activity, as it very likely is in other places, and those that haven't yet retired, it seems, are nearing the sunset period.
Nature abhors a vacuum. It was only a matter of time before others discovered this idyll nestled quietly and unobtrusively between New Britain and Hartford. It is anyone's guess what this place will look like in 10 years. Hell, in 5.
This isn't the only locale like it. I wonder if the dynamic is unique to New England. Aging, politically blue and largely white, unlike in many ways from their Midwestern counterparts but alike in so many more ways. No illusions of agrarian lifestyle here, but maybe head a little bit north on I-91 and in Massachusetts maybe the cobblestones speak of some of the same racially fraught history. It is still, however, the North.
This type of place doesn't get written about; at least, not where I can see. Even where cosmopolitan publications whose articles normally blanket my Newsfeed and Facebook wall write about small-town America, the perception is limited largely to the derisively-dubbed flyover country or the South or the Southwest, blood-red political communities. If small-town New England has been written about of late, it has been to discuss our newly acquired opiate crisis, with a nota bene for how hypocritical it is for both the governmental and social response to be of such a different tenor as what has faced communities of color held in the thrall of heroin.
I attended none of the local schools here. Most of my contact has been with the lovely older women who work at the library and the folks largely from New Britain who work at the spa on the other side of the gun store from the Chinese restaurant. Them and the black lady who I see sometimes behind the counter at the post-office. This is my permanent address on paper. But since my return from Paris, I've been bitten by the desire to learn this country more and occasionally dreams of cross-country road trips and ambling train rides and odysseys-by-bus will steam between my ears and behind my eyes. Yesterday, though, a pang of desire shot through my heart regarding this small town. I wanted to learn it more. And not remain within the bubble of my comfortable, circumscribed experience of it.
It is transforming. I don't know that the things I love about it are leaving, and I don't know that things I will love about it are arriving. But for once in my life, getting older hasn't made me less kind to change.
There is no real point to this rambling; it is only the product of my recent attempt at clearing my head after disastrous practice question sets by taking walks in temperatures below freezing. And it seemed worth the time it took to write it down.