It's a Big World. But Sometimes I Like to Pretend it's a Small One.

Sometimes life in a city-that-is-not-the-city-you-expected-to-find-yourself-in is somewhat surreal. On most days, after a period of adjustment, it feels fairly comfy, familiar, and happy. You've made friends, built a social life, have places to be on Friday nights, have laundry to pick up, rent to pay. Life in the Unexpected City isn't that different from the City you unfairly (routinely) compare the Unexpected City to.

But on those other days, the days you feel like a sore thumb, it's nice to have tiny moments of recognition with the occassional stranger who chances your way with, perhaps, similar feelings of semi-isolation. While in line to pay for my salad today, I spied a man wearing a William & Mary sweatshirt. As this is the school many of my relatives/friends thought I attended (I went to Washington & Lee) and it's a similarly history-laden Virginia school, I asked him if he was an Alum. When he said yes I told him I had attended W & L and you would have thought I'd just promised him a golden egg. In a short but happy exchange we established that neither of us are Minnesotans, both of us born in small, poor Southern states (Arkansas for me, Alabama for him), both disgusted with today's snow, and both stupidly smitten with the fact that we stumbled upon one another in a checkout line in St. Paul.

It's funny, really. I've had a couple moments of similar mirth recently, meeting folks from south of the Mason-Dixon, and for some manner of moments we forget that The South is a big ole place. All of the sudden Beaumont and New Orleans and Birmingham and Austin and Charlotte and "it's a small town outside Nashville" are all close enough to Home to merit a smile. I suppose when you're this far removed from Home you tend to expand the limits of Home, increasing the likelihood that someone from Home will find you tucked away in this cold, Swedish-y place.

As is to be expected, when these serendipitous meetings occur, someone has to mutter, "what a small world!" And you both smile and nod your heads, laugh a bit, and somebody mentions the time they drove through your hometown or the cousin they have who went to school there. But the world has never seemed small to me. It has always felt enormously, excitingly HUGE, and the more places I live, the bigger it becomes. Every place I visit, every home I have, just exacerbates my feeling that my life will be way too short to enjoy every place I could potentially love. I'll never be able to see it all. I'll never find all the people I could befriend. I'll miss the climbing of various mountains. There will be delicious foods I will never eat, much less learn to cook. There are worlds out there I will never find if I am constantly, comfortably back Home.

So the run-ins with my compatriots, my fellow Southerners, my people who say "y'all" and find my pronunciation of "New Orleans" to be correct not cute, my friends who know good barbeque when they smell the smoke, such run-ins and hellos make me happy. They bring Home here for a little while. But they also make me happy to be elsewhere, some corner of the world I never would have ventured to if not for a combination of natural disaster, mistake, coin flip, curiosity, and homesickness.