I have lived all my life in a village, Miss Marple says. There’s nothing I don’t know about human wickedness.
That line struck me as played for laughs in most productions, and, of course, in most readings of the story. But I don’t think Agatha Christie meant it that way. I certainly wouldn’t.
You see, I lived all my early life in a village.
First of all let’s disposed of the hazy, romantic idea of villages that inspired Hilary Clinton’s “It takes a village.” This is, if I may say so, a typical city-girl’s idea. They go into a village, and they hear the kids call every woman aunt, and they go away with their heads stuffed of incoherent stuff about the connections and the love and the caring and the collective beauty of villages and folk life.
Villages are – surprise – inhabited by humans, just like everywhere else. There’s good ones, there’s bad ones, and there’s “Oh my heavens, no.”
The difference is, in villages like the one I grew up in, and the one Miss Marple grew up in, (or Agatha Christie’s grandmother on whom Miss Marple was based) is that there were two other factors absent in even most villages today, except maybe in Africa: people had been there for uncounted generations, and people were BORED.
I don’t think any of us can understand the level of boredom I grew up with – not even me, and I vaguely remember it. The reason I read EVERYTHING that came into the house, including instructions for assembling machinery I wasn’t allowed near, my cousin’s “Portuguese romances” (the bullfighter dies. The singer who played him false mourns him forever) and my ten year older brother’s school books was that I was bored out of my gourd. I also religiously followed the almost bewilderingly stupid radio soap operas (everyone did) and after eight, when we had TV, religiously watched 40s American movies, in black and white. Those were a G-d send, as Sunday was the only day the TV station ran all day AND had movies (instead of variety programs, game shows and other local and cheap entertainment.) It meant that I never was tempted to do what other people did for fun on Sunday. Well, not after three or so, when I used to do it with my grandmother. What was that? Sit-at-the-stoop. For me it was literally sit on the stoop (I was little) but the older people brought chairs out, and sat by their front door. The entertainment? See who else was sitting at their door and what they were wearing. And since girls and boys “walked out together” to keep an eye on who was stepping out with whom. And for those who had “foreign” (from another village) family, like my mom, to watch them walk up main street on their way to the trolley car, and to note every aspect of how they were dressed what they did, etc.
Much was deduced and talked about from your expression walking up the village street. One of the first things I was schooled in was “do not frown, never look like you cried” etc. etc. It didn’t matter if the reason you were frowning is that you’d just come up with a cool idea and were working it out, or the reason you had cried was toothache. Next thing you knew you were the subject of a soap opera in which your parents beat you regularly and you were about to run away from home.
Most village gossip was/is bokum. My life was far more interesting in the gossips’ minds. You see, for instance, I was brought up as “honorary sister” to my brother’s closest childhood friends. This meant they were likely to pick me up in Porto, if they saw me walking, and give me a ride home. One of my honorary brothers, having caught on to my dentist schedule (I had extensive work done in 81) would be waiting for me in the coffee shop beneath the dentist every time because I usually had appointments after school and it was getting dark, and he didn’t want me walking alone in the dark. From this the gossips decided he was playing his fiancé false and was going to marry me. Dan? Oh, he’s just from the next village over, though I met him in Germany. (The last place I went to.) Etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
However, if you are smart, you can sift through the chaff. Smart women were feared because they knew exactly what you’d been up to. Miss Marple’s feats of reasoning, figuring out a murder from how the vicar’s wife wore a stocking with a hole in it or whatever, aren’t unlikely. I saw my grandmother do that type of thing all the time.
The problem with it is that when you pay attention you discover that in this small bucolic village there was just as much evil and malice as anywhere else. Worse, villages have long memories, and people would expect you to do things because your grandparents had done them. (Is it accurate? Well, it’s mixed. First, there is the expectation. Say, my great grandmother (true) left her husband and kids and ran off with some guy (well, she had good reasons, but never mind.) I understand my great aunts grew up with everyone EXPECTING them to do the same any minute. If you grow up with that there’s only two ways you can go and neither is normal. You either become a plaster saint, or you give in and go “sure, I’ll be the village whore.” (Fortunately this was my maternal great grandmother, and I grew up in a different village.) Second, there’s such thing as raising. If your parents starved your grandparents to death to inherit (not in my family thank heavens. Partly because there wasn’t much to inherit, but yes, a family in the village.) chances are your family life isn’t that warm and wonderful and that the principles you were given were less than stellar. Yes, there might also be a genetic component, but given those two first bits…)
Now this had its good side effects. It’s hard to tell, because, well, how can you? BUT I’m almost sure I had the same sensory issues my younger son suffered from, and so did my brother, and that they were resolved at about the same age (though even there, repetition in doing the tasks helped more than any fancy therapy.) I remember feeling that shirts that didn’t “prick” anyone else were rough. I remember having great trouble writing on a line WELL into my teens. I remember having trouble hearing directionally. I still have trouble with visual focus, which is what scares me about driving (among other things, like a culture that didn’t expect “normal” people to drive, but only the particularly gifted. Those things are hard to get out of the subconscious.) Now, even in the village this wasn’t normal. But as the youngest of a tribe that had gone through village schools (my great aunt on that side was the school mistress when dad was little) there was lore there. “Oh, she’s an Almeida” (I wish. It was actually “oh, she’s a potato seller”) “they’re all weird as children, but they’ll take the national exams in fourth grade beautifully. Don’t push her too much.” So, elementary school I came in when I very well pleased. I did homework when I felt like it. I mostly read – a lot. It worked for me, as it had worked for everyone from dad’s time on. If I’d been subjected to the discipline my kids endured, I suspect I’d have hated learning.
Other advantages, when people like you and/or know your family and know you’re mostly all right fall into that “non standard” mode. Our postman, for instance, started drinking when his wife left him. We would find him passed out in the gutter in the middle of the day. The way people dealt with it was to deliver the letters, take him inside, put him down in a sofa, and give him some tea or broth when he woke up.
He straightened out after six months of this or so, and he kept his job, because the village liked him (or at least he was one of us, and his wife was no better than she should be, and he was a fool to marry her – I’m reporting what the village thought.) So no one reported him to his supervisor in the next village, and everything went on fine.
These disadvantages are weighed down by everyone having known you when you were two. There is a reason for “no one is a prophet in his own home.”
The village I was brought up in no longer exists. It’s been filled with stack-a-prole apartments, and has self-concious “parks and meeting places” (We had the dirt paved plaza where everyone met coming and going because it just happened.) It has “Athletic associations” and “clubs” but it’s really just a suburb of the big city and most people there don’t know each other and their ancestors lived heaven knows where.
BUT if the village still existed, even if I were to become a mega bestseller (say on the Rowling scale) and go back, I’d be greeted with “Don’t you go putting on airs, missy, I am not surprised you make up those scandalous stories. I remember when you told everyone you met a sugar pig in life size around the edge of the field.” (It was a pink pig. Pigs in the village were black or brown. I’d never seen a pink one. They used to sell pink pig sugar candy, though, so I thought he’d come to life. Took a while to figure out there actually was a live pink pig.)
Worse, they’d say “I knew your grandmother and your great grandmother. Your grandmother also made up scandalous falsehoods when she was little. Was a lot of trouble to her mother.”
Impressed? Ah!
And this is why most people ran away from villages as fast as the industrial revolution permitted it, to the mingling pot of the cities, where you can be as anonymous or as chummy as you wish but few people can say “Young lady, I knew your great grandparents and they—”
Do I miss the village, sometimes? Oh sure. Who doesn’t miss their childhood? Though most of all I miss dad and grandma, and walks in the fields, and the cats and the dogs, and sitting really still on top of the terrace on a summer night, and looking up at the starry sky and dreaming.
Note, however, I didn’t choose to raise my kids in a village. There’s something about knowing people are staring at you and making much about everything you do and say that drives you a little insane. Or as my husband, who has heard my stories, says “it takes a village to drive someone around the bend.”
On the other hand, as a petri dish of human behavior, I’d recommend it to any budding writer.
I know a lot of malice. I grew up in a village. The worst villains in my stories come from that (fortunately not most of them my generation, but things grandma’s grandma told her.)
But then I grew up in a village, I know a lot of heroes.
In the states, in Portugal now, in most “advanced societies” heroes are people in stories and movies, people in the news, people who’ve done something big.
I knew a lot of heroes and angels. They didn’t carry swords. They didn’t have hallos. They were people who absorbed immense disaster (a wife who left, a husband who died very young) and went on, working at things they never thought they’d do, or coming home from a full job to clean and cook and be “mother” as well as father to two small children. I knew people who as a matter of course dove into traffic, to pull out a lost child or a lost dog. I knew women who walked in into the middle of a domestic dispute between a neighbor couple, where a knife had just come out, and stood up to the aggressor and said “That’s enough. Think shame on yourself.”
I know a lot about good. I grew up in a village.
Human nature is the same everywhere, but in a village you see it up close and personal, and you know the stories of generations.
It’s impossible to believe in a grey goo world of shades of grey and of people who are all a little tarnished.
In a village you know that people are certainly never like their public image. And that some are unimaginably worse.
But you also know that some are unimaginably better – and stronger, and nicer than you could ever be if you tried.
Growing up in a village gives you the dark and the light tints, as well as the grey. You can’t deceive yourself that good or bad don’t exist, that everything is “sort of good” and “sort of bad.”
Those are city illusions, contracted by people who only know people in books written (mostly) by boring German philosophers.
If you grew up in a village you know real people. You can’t help it. And you know that humans can be unimaginably vile, but also unimaginably good.
And you can’t help but write Human Wave.
According To Hoyt 
Yeah, sounds like my home town; although it’s changed a lot more than me over the decades. I knew the preacher’s son who was a thief – but he never smoked because his dad disapproved of smoking.
And I knew other people with the same schizoid tendencies. And they were just ‘people’. A good basis for an imagination bent on writing fiction.
I still wonder about the church deacon who allowed his teen aged daughter to wear clothes 2-3 sizes small. They didn’t always leave much to the imagination.
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I’ve just been re-reading “Perelandra,” by C.S. Lewis. Our hero is outraged at one point to realize that he’s been dumped into a situation where it seems his duty is to grapple physically with what amounts to Satan. His first impulse is to think, who sets up the world this way? How can it be possible that I’m supposed to play the hero here? Who would make so much depend on poor little me? Then he realizes that all of human existence comes down to individuals making individual choices to do the right thing, big or small, no matter how scary or painful, all day long, every day of their lives. God typically isn’t going to send angels with fiery swords to defeat the bad guy, or make us tell the truth, or storm the machine-gun emplacement, or rescue the kid from drowning. We’re it.
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I enjoyed that dilemma. I’d like to watch some of the “Give peace a chance” people read it and throw the book away when they get to that point.
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They wouldn’t get anywhere near that far in if they knoew it was a CS Lewis book. I mean think of the outrageous privilege of the author -pretty much your archetypical upper class male WASP, devout christian, etc. What could such a person know about real suffering or moral integrity? or ..
I think it’s Perelandra (if not maybe it’s other Lewis of GK Chesterton?) where the point is made that just maybe God chose the imperfect protagonost as the hero for everyone else so if he bottles it then all are lost. In other words God thought he could do it and was the right man for the job
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Is that why? There were 300 people, tops, in the town where I grew up. If I try to explain it to anyone I explain that you can’t get away from people there so you either learn to deal with them or you don’t. It’s more pleasant to get more choice in your associates, but I’m not sure it makes us better people.
And yes, they *all* remember when you wet your pants in 2nd grade.
As for rumors… my mom bought Pampers for a lamb they’d taken into the house the year after I left for school… draw your own conclusions.
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LOL.
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“Choosing your associates” I think is why so many people these days spend their lives buried in their cell phones. It becomes a virtual world disassociated from the real world and it’s problems. (I remember a video of a woman pulled over who was basically narrating the event to her friend on the phone, ignoring the officer’s commands to get out of the car, until he finally had to taze her to get her attention.)
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There are some of us that find the virtual community we belong to much more pleasant than the real one outside. I can count on my digits the people I call “friend” in this town without having to take off my shoes. I have about 300 online friends. Some of them I went to school with for twelve years, some of them are people I worked with in the military, some of them are people I share hobbies with, some of them are family, and some of them are the people here (and elsewhere) that I interact with. Some are people I’ve never met in person, and possibly never will. I make no distinctions between them, however. We share things in common, we enjoy each other’s company. The interactions we do experience make my life richer and more enjoyable. I hope they feel the same way. A “village” doesn’t HAVE to be physical any more.
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This, so very much. With having moved overseas, this is the only way I can keep in touch with my friends back in ‘the old country’.
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well yes. But this was what I meant yesterday when I blathered on about the lack of a single mass having a downside. I’ve had way more conversation with the people here than I have with my immediate neighbors. And sometimes (as yesterday when we had lots of exciting wildfires) that’s potentially a problem because if some of them hadn’t got the evac message (or didn’t have a working car or…) and the condo complex HAD burned down thwould have been a death on my soul
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I consider neighbors I have never talked to, “good neighbors”, if I’ve had to talk to them they may be categorized as good or bad, but if they mind their own business and I’ve never needed to talk to them, they automatically fall into the good category.
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Making contact scares folks.
I’m…. uh… well, I could be an extra in the Shire. And still when I’ve seen folks who clearly needed a hand while I’m out doing my walks, and I actually OFFER it– or when I went and told 329 her headlights were on– they react like I’m going to mug them.
Folks at the grocery store are friendlier.
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I grew up in a village, Clyde, Ohio. The similarities are amazing. The difference was that it was not quite so insular, people in the next town weren’t thought of as foreigners (except during football season). and of course we had television (but only one station, unless you had a really tall antenna). It used to have a lively Friday night until some merchants decided that they wanted to make it a Saturday night Town (I’ve got to watch Jacky Gleason). Didn’t work, the customers had cars and they uses them .There were two bigger towns 7 and 8 miles away, and that’s where they went on Friday night. Since we moved in town from Sandusky we were not quite part of the community, but we were. I always felt a slight sense of isolation, more like an observer than a participant,which makes me an odd.
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BTW, there were no secrets in the town.
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eh gods, no.
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The news of what I was up to, often got home before I did.
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LOL yup.
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Try having two cousins as police officers, one town-gossip aunt, one grandmother who knows the dirty the aunt only *thinks* she knows, an ex-sherrif’s deputy cousin, another cousin on the school board, another in jail, and a distant great uncle who worked at the newspaper.
I did not grow up in a village (Speck grew from Microscopic Dust Mite a bit before I came about). My folks moved from Smudge, an even smaller but more spread out place across the county line, before I was born. A great many of my relatives still live there (and quite a few are dead there, too). Speck was, is, small, but it has that peculiar character of small Appalachian towns in America. Backward is an accurate descriptor, sometimes.
I can remember playing on grandma’s living room floor underneath the lowering smoke clouds. Everybody smoked back then. Oh, the gossip that got told was *epic.* Large family, lots of cousins. Grandma’s information network was quite large. When I was four I learned which county judge was stepping out on his wife. When I was six I learned one cousin killed a man, that was why he fled to Alaska (he didn’t. Kill anyone, that is- he did go to Alaska).
Human beings are bizarre creatures. It doesn’t do for any of us to get too bored. We’ll find ways to entertain ourselves. Sometimes I think social media/facebook/twitter is a way of getting that very public life back, and I’d just as soon it stay gone for me. I like my privacy. I like a shady porch- and a looooong driveway. *grin*
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It’s funny. The same people who “love” Saint Hillary’s statement also sneer at small town narrow-mindedness and the “lack of privacy”. [Sad Smile]
Oh, my home town was/is far from a village but between Dad’s job (office manager), Mom’s job (school teacher) and their church activities if either me or my sister got in trouble, there would likely be somebody there who knew our parents. [Grin]
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Anyone who chooses not to be an off-the-grid hermit will lack privacy. The question is whether it’s your neighbors nosing in or the government. One or the other WILL know everything. I sincerely believe my neighbors care more – which I guess is both a good and a bad thing.
And governments are working hard to take the “hermit” option off the table.
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Also, we have dirt on our neighbors. ;) Helps to keep ’em honest.
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My dislike for Hillary’s uber-collectivist “It takes a village to raise a child” statement was one of the reasons I picked up one of those “It takes a Viking to raze a village” shirts from Mad Mike. (Danish/German/English ancestors being the other.)
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Hearing about living in a village makes me happy about growing up in New York City. There were always things to do esp. if you went to Manhattan.
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Like all lies, it’s got some truth but it’s applied wrong– it DOES take a community*– and, to her horror, she’d find that she doesn’t get to control everyone else in that community.
* the baseline is pretty dang low, from our POV; if you don’t have to worry about the family in the next house over will raid you for your daughters, you’ve got some kind of a community. Figuring out what balance of this to formalize (say, into government) and what to keep formalization as far away as possible from (friendships) is a prudential matter, with horror stories on either end.
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Yep, to Hillary the “village” was the government (likely federal government). She would have hated her neighbors commenting on how she raised her daughter. [Evil Grin]
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My response to Hillary (stolen from a T-shirt I proudly own) is that it takes a Viking to raze a village.
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My gosh, Sarah, we grew up in the same town but 8,000 miles away!
My village was all-white – literally had KKK (the high school counselor was rumored to be the local Klan leader) who burned out an African refugee family who moved in when I was in elementary school. Well, everyplace has to have someone at the bottom, and since there were no black people for that spot (their thinking, not mine) that was my family – “them Proctors ain’t never ‘mounted to nothing.” So imagine their surprise when I turned out to be not just acceptably intelligent and hardworking, but an outright prodigy. Despite my genius-level testing and bookworm reputation, they never quite believed it til I was in tenth grade and my PSATs blew away all the high school kids they thought of as smart. After that, they gave me ALL of the attention – well, good for them, but I already knew who and what they were. (Not that it was particularly comfortable being both a girl and “the smart one” out there in the countryside. Only my inherent scorn of THEIR scorn kept me sane.)
My dad was able to buy his farm only because the man who sold it to him (the elementary school principal) believed he’d not pay it off in the end and he’d get a free little sharecropping family running his farm in exchange for living in the crappy 3-room house (no indoor plumbing, barely wired for electricity) that came with it. My beloved papaw (great-grandfather) was a rogue and a cheat and a gambler, so we were all expected to turn out charming criminals. I love my family, but I wanted nothing more than to escape the stigmas that had been nailed onto me by the smug petty-elite small-pond-sturgeon of my community.
As for the boredom – I am a portable electronic device junkie because I was so starved for reading material as a child. I find myself looking at Kindles today thinking, good lord, if only I’d had one of these when I was eight!
And yes, I remember reading Hillary’s “It Takes a Village” title and snorting in disgust. And this was when I still thought I was a liberal.
I will say, though, in the village’s defense: they create conservatives and libertarians. If you don’t work, everyone knows it and talks about it. You SEE where your tax dollars are going – potholes not getting filled up, but that crackhead and his six baby-mamas are being taken care of. You see with your own eyes the damage illegal immigrants do, and you personally get to kick the EPA guy off your land – not his damned business! You learn to work directly with your neighbor to build fences, not run to the police or government for every little thing, and you check on each other instead of depending on a social worker to do it for you. Villages don’t depend on governments to do all those things because they do a much better job themselves.
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*grin*
Jamie, I escaped the worst of the worst by being born the next town over. But when I went to visit relatives… Oh, there’s stories that would curl a body’s hair told about |”those damned Lanes and their crazy boys.” Sadly, some of the worst ones are true.
Living well is indeed the best revenge. And small communities do indeed do those things. It’s tradition, it’s expected, and there’s seven hells to pay if you don’t, because often enough there comes a situation where your misdeeds will directly and negatively impact someone else. *chuckle*
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“It takes a village” to provide examples of career paths you shouldn’t follow. In every village it seems to me there’s at least one person whose purpose in life is to be an awful example to the next generation of what NOT to do
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There was a TV dramatization of the life of Dorothy Sayers, or some such person–I remember her line, “It won’t do to be the town drunk, dear. Not in Manhattan.”
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Spent my first 12 years in Poquoson, VA. Farming and fishing and the shipyard in Newport News, up until it was “discovered” in the 70s by families trying to avoid forced busing. It’s a bedroom community for surrounding cities now. McMansions everywhere, and a lot of the old families have had to sell out and move because of the growing property taxes.
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Funny thing; in Newport News or Hampton, folks from Poquoson were regarded the same way Arkhamites regarded Innsmouthers :-) We didn’t mind so much, as long as we had those inbred yokels in Black Walnut Ridge to look down on.
Ia, Dagon!
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Ah, that brings back the memories. I spent one year living in a very small Maine town. Eye-opening in many ways. Gossip was a full-contact sport, and since everybody was related to everybody else, in complex webs of allegiance it would take an ancient Roman to fully appreciate, it was safer for outsiders like us to just nod and listen. (We had a local family name, there before the Revolution, so we were treated as distant kin. Also we “wintered over” so we weren’t the scum of the earth aka tourists…)
It was also my introduction to the notion of “character” as Jane Austen would have known it. I was told by a local friend that since I was known as a “good” girl who didn’t sleep around, if I screamed for help while being attacked guys would drop the not-so-good girls *they* were attempting to attack and rescue me. A bit mind-boggling….
On the plus side, the town gossip network would spread the word (quietly) that Joe had broken his leg and couldn’t work and his wife was sick and it was getting pretty cold– and a cord of wood would mysteriously appear in Joe’s driveway and a nice wrapped casserole would appear on the back step and somebody else would invite Joes’s kids to a party where they got to run riot and mysteriously got all the leftovers at the end. It was considered Bad Form to seek out someone who did these things to thank them. It was just understood you would repay the favor when you were able and somebody else had a streak of bad luck.
But yeah, no secrets. Everybody knew everybody else’s business. As some drug smugglers found out to their dismay once…. “We don’t know that boat and nobody is expecting visitors!” the locals said to the cops, and sure enough.
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It would be embarrassing to ask for help *but* there is also a significant social obligation not to say no, either. So the act of asking is placing an obligation on someone else, which is really rude, and who knows what condition they’re in anyhow? So needs are stated in general ways… “I sure don’t know how I’m going to get that… whatever.” which leaves others the option of helping or not helping. I have an uncle who’d respond to such a thing with, “So ya need a ride home after the game, do ya?” And that acknowledgement was him noticing your need… the rest of it assumed. But if you were from out of town and expected *reason*, you expected a *yes*…
Different languages. And I used to think it was specifically scandinavian, but it’s probably mostly small-town-gotta-live-here.
I remember reading something, and I think it wasn’t fiction, about a family with kids with an odd light-sensitivity condition that moved to a small town and had to face the distrust and gossip and I thought… you’re doing it wrong. The day after you move in, as soon as you can figure out who the biggest gossip is, you invite her over, tell her all your personal stuff *particularly* your kid’s odd medical condition in excruciating detail, gush a bit about how nice and pretty and welcoming everyone has been (lie if necessary) and then set her loose.
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yup
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There were still villages like that left here when I was growing up, but my parents were among the ones who had left for the cities. That farm of my uncle I spend one month each summer on was in an area which might have been like that, but I didn’t spend enough time there to notice much. Probably good. Years later, when visiting my last living aunt, one who had married into the family, I learned interesting gossip about my family, like that when they had been young my father and his siblings seems to have been kind of wild, all kinds of scandalous behavior like hard partying with drinking and loose women (my father before marriage and my oldest then living uncle who never married – oldest had been the American born one who had gone back there the minute he was old enough, and then died there during the 40’s – uncle had once almost done it, had brought a young lady from a different small town to his home and all and the wedding was planned for the near future, but then he had gotten in a last minute tiff with his bride and had send her back home on the next train).
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Oh yeah. I had to explain some of this, in a sideways way, to some students who were reading “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The whole idea of “Well, he’s a Wilkins [or Duran, or Westra, or whatever], what do you expect?” and “Smiths will starve before they’ll be beholden to anyone” didn’t make a lot of sense. And then there’s village geography . . . :)
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“Well, he’s a Wilkins ”
Seems perfectly sound reasoning to me.
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One more cultural point I picked up from growing up on Sackett novels. Never could find a Higgins worth the rope it would take to hang him…
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The saying I always heard growing up (and still use myself, it gets strange looks in certain company ;) ) was, “ain’t worth the powder it’d take to blow his brains out.”
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My sister-in-law, the social worker, describes some of her clients as being ‘not worth turning into Soylent Green’ (but then, she’s fannish).
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Another note – the Oyster clan seems to be one of the few families I know that have a narrative like that. We have certain common traits, a bit of solid family culture, and a fair number of internal stereotypes, individual and collective. I’ve also noticed that we absorb people into the clan (some via marriage, others not. I have two pseudo-sisters that dated brothers of mine but married other men; their membership in the family has long outlasted those courtships), but we’re none of us absorbed into others, despite being close with our in-laws.
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My maternal grandmother’s family, the Jacksons, are like that.
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Whoa…avatar switch. Throwing my brain for a loop.
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Everything is better with Legos.
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Works for me! I had/have a Lego avatar with my generic online ID. Don’t use it much anymore.
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Um… did you mean Legos, or Legolas?
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Legos but Legolas is good too.
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The small towns I have been in– I am usually the outsider. It is an interesting perspective– even though I found out later that I was probably related to most of the town (Mormon– and many of the same bloodlines)– I was treated like a stranger– I brushed the dirt off my shoes as quickly as I could–
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This reminds me of the family stories my parents tell about their families, only on a larger scale. The way my paternal grandfather encountered his (not yet) father-in-law during a pool hall fight (they were both crawling for the door) but neither said a word the next day when he came to pick my grandmother up for a date. The time my grandfather was gambling (illegally) and my grandmother was mad about it, so she sat herself on the hood of the car and when the police stopped to tell her that this wasn’t the safest neighborhood to do that in, she told them she was waiting for her husband to finish playing poker. How my great grandfather supported the family during the Depression playing ‘pinochle’ and no one knows for sure whether this was really code for poker.
While too much village life might drive one bonkers, I wonder if we’re suffering from too little? It seems like a lot of people have lost the ‘feel’ for what makes a good story, which is another thing I think we learn from close observation of human nature.
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Man is by nature a social animal, and an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something in nature that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or he is a god.
– Aristotle, Politics
Which is why we do not all exercise our individual rights by becoming hermits: it’s not in our nature. Which is where the fun really begins.
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Poker is good for a person who is good at hiding his emotions, while Pinochle is good for one who has skill at estimating his opponents’ strategies and in playing to break their bids. Which of these he was would give an indication which was the most likely case.
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He was both. In my family, the triad of excellent bluffing skill, strategic insight, and absurdly good fortune is still known as the Fitzsimmons Luck.
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How my great grandfather supported the family during the Depression playing ‘pinochle’ and no one knows for sure whether this was really code for poker.
Given the way my grandparents played, it’s entirely possible it wasn’t…..
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I had a grandfather that was a professional gambler for a time. I never understood as a kid why he wouldn’t touch a deck of cards or play with us kids. I’m not sure it was all on the up and up either, anyways I mentioned something one time about a ‘slick ace’ and he said he could deal one from anywhere in the deck. He was supposedly reformed when he married my grandmother, but would occasionally backslide and get into a ‘friendly game’, my grandma has told the story several times about the last time he played. It was just after their daughter was born (youngest of 8 kids) and he went for something and left grandma at home without a car, it was the next day before he showed back up, flashing a big roll of bills and giving them to grandma. She was mad and threw them back at him, telling him she didn’t want his dirty money and didn’t want to see it again. He picked it up and left, she said she never did know what he did with it, but she never seen it again, and it was probably several months wages.
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Where I grew up couldn’t even be considered a village — it was more rural than that. I also grew up surrounded by relatives (my grandparents lived next door, a cousin lived on the other side, an uncle lived across the street, and another lived in a house behind my grandparents — just for starters). I had 900 acres of mixed-woods and pasture to roam in. When I started school, I went to the same school as two of my aunts and eleven of my first cousins. If you did something wrong, you didn’t get to wait until you got home to be punished — whoever was closest administered it. Dad was a frustrated farmer, and always had a garden (usually an acre or more), milk cows, and fruit trees. He shared our bounty with anyone who needed it.
I agree that it teaches you a lot about people when you’re growing up in that kind of environment. One of the kids that tried to torture me (I kept beating the snot out of him every time he tried) during my school years is serving life without parole for murder. Others were on-again, off-again friends. Many I still keep in touch with (the Internet makes it much easier!).
I grew up in the 50s and early 60s, and life was easier then.
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I grew up in a smallish CA city, and then I went to live in a small town in another country as an exchange student. It wasn’t quite a village, but it was very very close. My host mom would say things to me like “We need to get you new shoes, people are asking me why you wear such ratty shoes,” and I was totally flabbergasted. Who cared about my sneakers? Every so often I’d do the wrong thing at school or something and she would know before I got home. It was really hard to wrap my brain around. I couldn’t understand why anyone would CARE.
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Oh yes. Don’t you dare go to the grocery store without full makeup.
Drives my mom nuts (still) when I go over.
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That sounds like my mother in law to my wife. And yes my in laws live in a very small village
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I knew a lot of heroes and angels. They didn’t carry swords. They didn’t have hallos. They were people who absorbed immense disaster (a wife who left, a husband who died very young) and went on, working at things they never thought they’d do, or coming home from a full job to clean and cook and be “mother” as well as father to two small children. I knew people who as a matter of course dove into traffic, to pull out a lost child or a lost dog. I knew women who walked in into the middle of a domestic dispute between a neighbor couple, where a knife had just come out, and stood up to the aggressor and said “That’s enough. Think shame on yourself.”
A few years ago, in the winter time, one of the women walking to the bus slipped on ice and fell down. The bus driver went out to help her up and get into the bus (I was way in the back, so going to help would have been a waste of time at that point). The lady sitting next to remarked on how nice it was for the bus driver to go help her like that. I didn’t say anything, but I sat there thinking, “When the hell did it become something to remark on with a note of surprise that this would happen? It should be expected.”
Now, I’ve read things about the mindset that people in a big city get into, where they both tune things out, and consider that many things are someone else’s responsibility, but this was in a moderately-sized city, without much of the daily input overload that marks the big city thinking. (Walks off, shaking head)
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Don’t get me started on bus drivers. As a Detroit area native who rides busses I can tell you that are drivers are terrible. I’ve actually had drivers pull off while I was pouding on the back of the bus trying to get them to stay because my previous bus got me there late. Most drivers, at least here, just don’t care.
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That line struck me as played for laughs in most productions, and, of course, in most readings of the story.
*blink*
HOW?!
She always proves that she’s entirely right– it honestly never occurred to me that someone might think that’s supposed to be accurate, not after finishing a single story!
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I do think that’s a funny line, but true nonetheless. Consider also that Jane Austen has Elizabeth express a similar view in “Pride and Prejudice”, and the Father Brown stories, where a simple Catholic priest has a greater insight into evil than the police he is paired with. Then there is Mrs. Rachel Lynde in the “Anne of Green Gables “, who, if you went into your room at midnight,drew the drapes, and *sneezed*,would ask you the next day how your cold was. :-)
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Yeah, L.M. Montgomery had an excellent grasp of village life in her books.
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I’m living in a regional PA version of a small town (outside it, anyway). We’ve been absentee landowners for almost 30 years, but now we’re here for real. You know you’re in a rural town when it seems like most of the local families have been here since the Indians left and dug in like a patch of irises that are overdue for dividing. (In VA, they could tell you how they were related to anyone else of the same last name. In PA, they lose the plot after 3 generations).
Thankfully, there’s a slot for “exotic outsiders who at least hunt & fish and let us use their land for same”.
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In the states, in Portugal now, in most “advanced societies” heroes are people in stories and movies, people in the news, people who’ve done something big.
I think this is part and parcel with the notion that “Great Things” are done by “Great Men.” Which allows them to invalidate anything someone has done by pointing to their flaws. Not a “Great Man” so those things can’t be great, probably not even good.
It also allows people to fail to step up, because — I’m not great, so I can’t be a hero, so why bother? Maybe less why bother, and more “I can’t.” I’ve never been great before, it’s too late to be great now, and there’s no way I could…
I’ve said it here before, our great men (women included) weren’t “Great Men” they were regular folk of one stripe or another who did great things. They were flawed, broken, fallible people. But they stepped up at a critical time. I try to remember that with my characters, they’re not Superman. Neither are they anti-heroes. They’re people, and they’ve stepped up when it was needed.
I’ve seen it in person, I’ve got the history of it in my family, and in happened in the town I grew up in. Good, bad, both. You know, human.
Still trying to ride that wave.
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That quoted portion bothered me the first time I read it, but now, reading this, the reason crystallized:
I fail to see how heroes being someone who has done something big is any different than it has been for thousands of years. What are Beowulf, or The Iliad and The Odyssey? All kinds of other stories?
The problem is not the fact that heroes have done something big, it’s that they are no longer presented as something to strive for. All the heroes are so flawed that no one wants to emulate them. That, plus the people who are held up as “heroes” in the real world are not so much heroes as people who have done something to appease the PC Gods.
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Um… it was wrong in the Iliad and the Odyssey and Beowulf too, Wayne. The “heroes” were sons of the gods or royalty or particularly blessed. Those days — she said — were not supposed to be ours.
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I don’t know. I still disagree.
Basically, you’re saying that the heroes we’re presented with are too awesome for us to bother aspiring to emulate.
I’m saying few if any of them are worth the effort of emulating.
When comic book heroes were shining examples of heroism, children wanted to be “just like them”. It doesn’t take too much mental effort to realize that you can’t really be just like Superman, but you can try not to disappoint him, and to live up to the values he espoused as best you can in your less-than-invulnerable person. But when Captain America was turned a drug addict, who would want to emulate that?
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I’m saying that the heroes in stories are fine, but not if the kids never experience anything else, Wayne. the heroes in stories are the big picture to aspire too, but if you know normal GOOD people then you know “I could be that, maybe, but meanwhile I can at least be decent.”
Part of the reason these people want grey goo is that they think real, everyday people are “grey goo.”
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Yes on the grey goo bit. They think normal people are fairly awful. And so, “even though I’m a bit of an ass, I’m still better than most…”
It’s the same well they draw comments like “oh, I’d trust you with x, it’s all those other people that scare me” from. They tear down the old heroes with new dark habits because they think it makes them more ‘real.’ Because they don’t see the nobility of character of the old hero as just a bit better, but completely beyond them. And if it’s beyond them…
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Part of the reason these people want grey goo is that they think real, everyday people are “grey goo.”
See, I see that as being because they elevate a**holes to the level of hero, rather than actual good people.
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Some of those heroes- and I’ve met one or two I’d call that- think of themselves as a**holes that others have elevated to that level, and don’t deserve it. They’re applying an impossible standard to themselves.
Folks get discouraged when they fail to meet impossible standards. It’s also discouraging to have “heroes” that actually *are* a**holes most of the time, too. There needs to be some reality to latch on to, so folks can say “I could do that.”
Take Western heroes, for instance. The white-hat guy rides in, captures/kills the bad guy, saves the maiden without ravishing her in bad guy’s place, drives the herd home, end of story. Not exactly comic book hero stuff, but all doable by pretty much ordinary folks with decent self discipline and ability.
Contrast that with the impossible knight, who defeats wizards bent on world domination with his mighty thews, whom all the ladies adore, who never suffers so much as an artless stumble in battle (let alone a boil on his arse), ever victorious, never shameful. The emphasis on *never* failing isn’t very useful, and is unhealthy if one internalizes it.
Overcoming failure is a very, very important life skill to have. Because it’s going to happen. A lot, for some of us. That’s what I’m getting from what Sarah says.
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Yes–I’d rather read stories about Atticus Finch than about Superman. My favorite storyline involves an ordinary person who rises to the occasion and behaves much better than you’d have thought he might, just when you thought the author was going down the old path of “look how awful society and fate are.”
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Aristotle observed that we wanted characters who were as good as us, or a little bit better. While he included more than moral goodness, it would indeed include that. . . .
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Yes, most of the heroes in the Iliad were children of gods and/or royalty.
But pretty much anybody in Greece who wasn’t a foreign barbarian (shudder) could claim to have descended from a god or gods and various kings, through his tribe’s founding myths; and so could most of the foreign barbarians, probably, because the ancient world was full of similar founding myths. If you weren’t already, or if the founding myth wasn’t picturesque enough, it was routine to amend genealogy so that you had a better founding myth. (And there’s the Aeneid for you.)
I’m Irish, so of course I know what kings I’m descended from; and the O’Neills have proved that the clan thing is usually based on genetics and not just locality. And since the O’Briens were a subclan that didn’t have any exciting ancestry that their rivals didn’t have, additional De Danaan ancestry was found or added by the genealogists when Brian Boru and his descendants got powerful. Heck, I even know who’s supposed to have been the Sidhe girlfriend of one of the O’Briens who died heroically.
But unless you count things like heroes with “special properties”(Cuchulain could turn himself inside out), the Irish heroes don’t usually do anything ordinary people couldn’t do (although they tend to do it longer and make more speeches). A lot of Greek myths are the same.
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Oh yes. In Plato’s dialogues, it is assumed that everyone has an ancestral god.
though one Greek writer wrote of a Greek who went to Egypt. He claimed to be descended from the gods in the eighth generation, safely beyond documentation. Egyptian priests took him to a temple where a priestly lineage was document for over a hundred generations, with no gods in sight.
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I’m truly not trying to beat a dead horse here, but I noticed something that is giving me a discontinuity, so if you could clarify, maybe I can see the big picture of where you’re coming from.
This:
In the states, in Portugal now, in most “advanced societies” heroes are people in stories and movies, people in the news, people who’ve done something big.
Seems contradictory to this:
Part of the reason these people want grey goo is that they think real, everyday people are “grey goo.”
However, now that I start writing it out, I have a thought – Is it because you think that people see an unbridgeable gap between “real people” and “heroes”? And that this is because there are no (or at least, not enough) major stories about normal people doing good things?
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yes. And not just because of stories, because those didn’t use to be needed. People lived in small communities and KNEW “heroes” Now they don’t, so they depend on stories to tell them how other people are.
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I’m truly not trying to beat a dead horse here…
I always looked at as a precordial thump folllwed by *ahem* — vigorous CPR.
That said, your last paragraph nailed my thinking, anyway.
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Heroes give you ideals to live up to. I’m sure that many Marines want to be as good a Marine as Chesty Puller. As a girl in parochial school I wanted to be as good a person as the Matriarchs (Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah). Other women in the bible didn’t seem too extraordinary to imitate.)
You are encouraged to imitate someone so extraordinary that you wouldn’t consider it at first glance. There is I believe a Catholic book of theology called Imitatio Dei. Imitation of God.
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I think I get where you’re coming from Wayne, particularly about not something to strive for. But I think Sarah’s got the right of it, in those stories regular people weren’t stepping up. Beowulf was anything but the average Joe. The were big people doing big things.
I’m more interested in the gal that goes back into the burning building. Or sits on the stairs beside his dying friend, and rides the tower down. The regular people who made the tough choice. Those are things worth striving for.
The problem, of course, is in striving for regular people we created the anti-hero and then everybody raced to see who could be the most anti. And we have dismal, lousy and maybe disgusting people who might be forced by circumstance and the coincidence of their own narrow self-interest to serve the hero’s role, but only until they can drop the mantle and get back to their dark existence. And who wants to strive to be that guy?
I just want characters who are basically decent people, who choose to step forward and take risks and do hard things. Who do heroic things without being HEROIC people.
It’s one of the problems I have with the Hero’s Journey.
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Amen
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“No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is a valet.”
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When my grandmother was in her eighties, and legally blind, she rented a shed in the back of her property (about 200 yards from the house) to a guy who said he was going to repair some cars.
The guy paid one months rent, and then nothing. She talked to the county sheriff, and he said that after giving 30 days notice, she could just dump his stuff on the curb. So 30 days later, she asked the guys who worked in the small engine repair shop next door to haul his stuff out.
The guy sued. He seemed convinced that she was a helpless old lady, given that she was blind and could barely walk.
Now you have to understand my grandmother. She was the first woman in the county to go to college. All the years that her husband was running that small engine repair shop, she was tutoring grade school kids. This being a small town, all the brightest kids headed off for the city. And of the not-so-bright kids who stayed, those who’d actually made it through school and lead relatively successful local lives were disproportionately her former students. Like the mayor, the county sheriff, and the judge who heard the case.
Of course, that he’d stuffed the judge into his gym locker, in seventh grade, may have had something to do with it, as well…
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You were raised in a village?
I have been assured, by someone who accounted themselves quite expert, that I must have been raised in a barn.
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Ah. We couldn’t afford barns!
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You knew my Dad?
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He was an expert in assessing the kind of structure you were raised within as well?
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According to my Dad I was raised in a barn also, but I don’t recall you being there, so it was probably a different barn.
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Um… My dad says I was raised in a pigsty? I think this is a terrible way of talking about mom’s housekeeping. Besides, I don’t think anyone cleans pigsties with a toothbrush.
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I believe I was raised in cave. Which is odd seeing as the land was clay and completely lacking in suitable rock
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Hard to find good limestone these days …
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That’s because the evil capitalists are hoarding it; to make their evil supervillian lairs in.
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duh. Not enough gulches
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Dammit, bearcat! You promised you weren’t going to talk about that anymore! I’m afraid we’re going to have to revoke your evil supervillian henchman card.
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He sure kept asking if I was raised in one. That and the assertions that my brother and I were vaguely bovine–sh!t and walk away from it etc.
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That was supposed to be a followup to:
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2014/05/15/i-was-raised-in-a-village/#comment-169051
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Well, if he was asking you if you were raised in a barn, then he’s not truly an expert. An expert figures out that you were raised in a barn – through some sort of psychic power I think – and informs you of that fact.
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I spent my childhood in a small town, but my parents had moved to it from a thousand miles away. So no neighbors could assess me according to what they knew of my grandparents or great-grandparents.
Because it was in New England, home of “good fences make good neighbors,” gossip may not have been as intense as in other areas.
Not withstanding “good fences make good neighbors,” in times of crisis, neighbors were helpful. Several years after my parents moved to the small town, they were passengers in a car that a drunk plowed into, necessitating a month’s stay in the local hospital. My father had been in the midst of painting our house when the accident occurred. While he was recuperating in the hospital, neighbors finished painting the house for him. My parents had been in town only a short time, which made this helpfulness even more amazing.
Even before we got a TV when, like Sarah, I was 8 years old, it was hard to get bored. There were miles of woods to explore, and when I got a bicycle,miles of roads to explore- roads which back then were very little traveled and so safe for a kid to ride a bicycle.
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My father had been in the midst of painting our house when the accident occurred. While he was recuperating in the hospital, neighbors finished painting the house for him.
People really do want to help.
My birth-town bypassed a lot of the problems because it imported the little villages from at least three countries (Scotland, Italy, whatever you call Spanish Basque), plus the Indian-ish populations around, plus the Rez, and as cars made it so that 60 miles away was inside of dating distance they added Catholic Irish and a bunch of mostly English working men from around Chicago. (Dad’s dad was in that bunch– there was something about some company there that hired on to do the electricity and some dam work, and a bunch of families’ boys all hired on, and… well, the local girls were adorable…..)
Yeah, some of the stuff is crazy as can be, and there’s a MAJOR danger of folks like my brother actually believing what our “I prefer this story” aunt tells him, but it really does cure any crazy misconception about “people are all assholes*.”
*I think this is part folks doing the “but I’ll never have to deal with these guys again so I’m not accountable” thing, part folks being defensive about their behavior, and mostly folks just misinterpreting people-doing-their-best stuff. Yes, even the *bleep* who made me think I was about to run someone over by slamming on my car’s hood at the store, who then proceeded to obscurely threaten me I think because I’d left my kids in the car. While I ran in for a drink for the baby. While it was 55*. And raining. When it is not illegal. POSSIBLY he didn’t know that, or he thought the van was running, because there was a simi idling nearby… or maybe he thought I was shoplifting, because I’m a fat woman in my husband’s old coat who fidgets, so it looks like I’ve got lots of room to stash stuff. Or maybe he was just a raving ass. I kinda favor the last, since he was obviously an officer and was buying beer at noon on a Friday, but reality might prove me wrong. Wow, that’s a rant. Didn’t know I was still pissed. I really hate being attacked where I think I’m safe, and respond rather violently… which would be another reason for the “people are all horrible” notion.
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Unfortunately with the tremendous amount of radio commercials*, etc. against it, a lot of people do believe it is illegal. My preacher’s wife got this rant a couple months ago, for leaving her kid sleeping in the car when she could see him out the window of the church, while she was doing some work there. It wasn’t going to get to warm in car (it was raining out) she could see him so it wasn’t like somebody was going to snatch him, and he was teething and had finally fallen asleep on the drive. If she would have taken him out he would have woken up and thrown a screaming fit for everyone to enjoy, but apparently this was preferable to letting him sleep.
*I think over half the commercial space on our local radio stations is bought by the government. I really appreciate my tax dollars going to pay for somebody to tell me not to leave my (nonexistent) kid in the car, make sure my 20 year old kid wears a helmet when skateboarding or bicycling, make sure and sign up for Obamacare, remind me to go check, possibly I am eligible for SSI disability, make sure and buckle your seatbelt, don’t buy alcohol for minors, urge me to quit smoking (a habit I never started), repeatedly inform me that red meat is evil, etc.
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You forgot the ones about how if you leave school two days early to visit your grandparents, you’re not going to graduate.
On the kids in cars thing: I found an… interesting thing. They include kids who got in the cars on their own in the “deaths due to being left in cars” statistic.
Add that to how deaths are because parents forgot the kids were there, and…well….
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Yeah, I’ve been hearing that one a lot lately, and of course it is all the parents fault, it has nothing to do with them constantly extending the school year by creating half days and teachers workdays, etc., so that they have almost no summer vacation. Because year-round school is better…blech.
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And just like the “kids improperly secured,” the “kids dying in hot cars” and even the “gun violence against kids”– they inflate the numbers with stuff that is not even slightly related.
With the “improperly secured,” they count that for any instance where the kid is…found… someplace besides their seat, by the cops.
The car one rolls in stuff that should be classed with the old “kid hides in a fridge and dies” stories.
and the gun violence one includes eighteen year old gangsters shot while trying to kill people.
For the school– Wow, the kids who miss more than three days of school are less likely to graduate, and if you include the ones that had the flu for a week with the ones who got kicked out for dealing drugs and the ones who just don’t care– and probably the ones that transferred to a different school– they’ve got a low graduation rate?!?
I am STILL pissed at the “perfect attendance” award. That got a lot of people sick by folks who should NOT have been in school.
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Being of somewhat the same generation as St Hillary the Blest (she is about as much older than my older brother as he is than me) I confess a certain frisson of amusement when she published her “We should all live in a village, like Patrick McGoohan’s” book.
It didn’t require much observation to recognize that Hillary, back in High School, would have been one of those kids griping about how stultifying life in “the ‘burbs” was, what with everybody minding everybody’s business, constantly watching you and ratting out your efforts to escape the dull conformity of that “Leave It To Beaver” world.
Thus we become what we detested.
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A village doesn’t actually have to be a village. It can be a neighborhod in a town where people don’t move much. I grew up (to age 10) in a small village and have friends who grew up in mill towns and steel towns, apart from the presence of fields ti was all very similar. The words were different “Them at #42 are above themselves and #35 are thieves” vs “The Smiths think themsleves gentry and I wouldn’t leave a pencil out where the Jones’ can see it” but the attitude is the same, as is the inability to escape notice from your neighboring gossips.
I think, on the whole, I’m in favor of villages and, while I think St Hillary was romanticising the whole thing, I do think a village or small town is a good size for people to live in. The trick is you have to have a way to escape if that particular small town isn’t the one you like then.
I find it interesting that in (fairly rural) Japan, people build these villages almost by habit. The cul-de-sac where we have our house there has all the attributes of a village established for millennia but it was a bankrupt factory surrounded by rice paddies 5 or 6 years ago. But now theres the dozen or so families not to mention the people across the main road (we look down on them because they bought/built cheaper houses) but who count as the “long term residents” compared to the newcomers on the adjacent development to the east and so on. But yet there are semi-formal networks of parents so that if little blahblah-kun is being a bit too wild his mother gets a nod and a wink that this is so and if there’s a sudden rainstorm everyone knows the kids are at soandso’s house.
My wife comes from a nearby small rural community and almost every child there leaves when they graduate high school. For a few years at least to sow wild oats and see what the big city life is like. Then they often come back, if not to that small village to one near by. That small community quite literally had a village idiot when I was first there. Said village idiot would sit at the bus stop and engage any passers-by, and if none the sky, with loud conversation about this and that on those days when he wasn’t working whatever simple job he’d been given. It can be tough to conform and hard to be appreciated but it seems to me that the really evil power mad people leave quick and don’t come back because the village isn’t enough for them
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I live in a rural community now. Grew up in suburbia, and never lived more then 4 years in one place until the last 17 years of my 58. Roads here are named after families still living on them. My family history of direct line ancestors, on every branch I can trace to arrival in North America from the 1500’s (earleist) to 1880’s (latest) is interesting. Not a single one has died within 50 miles of where they were born. Not unusual now, a bit unusual then. And none lived near other family. Around my current ruralville, most of the people I associate with have all kinds of family in town. Some 4 generations worth. They all behave differently then me, my wife and kids do. It’s hard to explain how, but they do.
My visits to the local barber are what keeps me informed on the goings on in town. At least the goings on of most. The Mennonites and the Amish, who currently comprise much of the population, have very little interaction with us English. (Their term.) They don’t belong to the Legion or VFW, or the Boy or Girl Scouts, and their kids go to their own private schools.
Don’t know which is better enviornment to bring up kids in. My two eldesy moved every 3-4 years. My two yougest have lived only here. My middle half his childhood here. And to date, they are all doing well. One still left in school. From my experience, I’d say more important then a village, it takes a Mon and a Dad to raise a kid right.
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