Going native: -or- how I learned to stop worrying and love being a townie

[ Open: steam curls from the cup of coffee, stirred by spoon then laid to rest on its saucer. Pull back through open window to show two figures conversing within the third floor apartment. Continue long pull back through nighttime in the park. Tens, hundreds, thousands of illuminated windows come into view as we continue to pull back back back accelerating, revealing a neighborhood scene, a city scene, region, state, continent, planet. ]

As a younger man with a filmic mind, this is how I always pictured my life: a moment at the center of the universe. But why this place? How do you land where you are, and what’s the point of living there? Living in large metropolitan settings, I couldn’t fathom life in one of those towns off the interstate, slim white arrows off the vast trunks connecting the real places. What’s the point of those places?

I found out; I moved to one of them. Drawn by career to the Vatican of Barbershop Quartets, the old Harmony Hall on Third Avenue, I came to Kenosha fifteen years ago to make my life in God-knows-where Wisconsin. I had to live here to do this work. I accepted the tradeoff.

Surprise: Kenosha got me. Showing visitors around the mansion, I learned the lore of its industrial history, architecture, immigration, and how these shaped its mindset. It was fun.

I went native. The town’s fairest flower benignly showered on me the blessing of her love. Her family, third generation Kenoshans, business owners and civically active, showed me that goodness is where goodness grows. What brave new world was this, to have such people in it?

At my sister’s wedding, the presiding pastor, an old family friend, homilized: “Maybe this doesn’t seem to be such a big deal on the global scale, but it is. Every marriage is fundamentally the most important thing in the world. It is the foundational commitment to say that we will hold the world together.” Now ten years married, this truth fills our every day.

So we hold it together right here in K-Town. Compare: amidst overbuilt McMansions of sprawl, throttled by Amityville homeowner association codes, people in the mushrooming edge cities of metropolis ask the same ongoing question of “how here?” And they seek the answers in the same places: in their churches, their schools, their community life.

Over time, through school PTO meetings, church buildings and soccer snack days, the answer becomes you without your even noticing it. When what you do becomes more important than what you have, where you live becomes trivial.

What defines do? Raising good, proud, responsible children. Making art. We make art and music and theater and poetry and teach our children to value them. (Note to self: find out more about the school music program cuts. How can we aspire to greatness when we eliminate its mainspring?)

I’m lucky. My skills and experience mean I can pursue almost any career I choose, anywhere in the country. My wife’s family business, though, 50-some years in the community, has no desire of picking up and moving operations. So when my employer began considering relocation, we had to assess what came next.

Last week, at a large convention, the truth emerged. Friends from around the world asked, “So Brian, are you moving?” I explained that we are choosing to stay where my wife’s family and business were. “Yes, but do you want to live there?” Stop. Think. I'd never framed the question that way.

It’s good to live in a place where Monday nights find 40 families laughing and cheering three-year-olds on trikes at the Velodrome. Where you reliably see the newspaper publisher at every charitable event. Where a stop sign means “align your rear axle with the crosswalk.” (OK, that’s not so good.)

Kenosha grows on you, like a beer belly. Yes. I want to live here.

Ich bin ein Kenosher.

[ close: crane shot, starting three quarters low, up into face of man gazing confidently into sunrise over Lake Michigan. Rotate around to show lighthouse. Pull up over lighthouse to show harbor, lakefront, downtown. Continue pulling up up up up to show entire Lake Michigan, continent, from space. Fade through blazing white. ]