Where They'll Put Me In The Ground

I love going to Boston. Love Fenway, the buildings, the accents, the history as you walk the streets and look at things that have been there for hundreds of years and will be there for hundreds more after I'm long gone.

But I couldn't live there. The noise, the traffic, the people EVERYWHERE at all hours of the day would send me running and screaming to the nearest loony bin after 6 months. I can't help it; I was born in a small town in Virginia, grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, and for the past 21 years have lived in a small town in North Carolina. I love going to the city, but I'm just a small town sort of guy at heart.

I like the fact they roll the sidewalks up at 8 p.m. and the cops driving through my neighborhood 4 or 5 times a night. Granted, they do this because there is nothing else going on, but that's a good thing, right?

I can walk outside on my back porch right now, at 11 p.m. on a Saturday night, and not hear anything but crickets and the occasional bull frog in the patch of woods behind my house. Main Street has 2 stop lights, a hardware store, the post office, and 2 locally owned restaurants and every building is full.

I thought about this tonight while we ate dinner with two other families in our neighborhood at the local pizza place and realized that my kids are growing up just like I did, albeit in a much louder and faster paced world. And I'm glad I'm getting to raise them in sort of the same way my Mom and Dad raised me.

'Cause the world is fast enough just as it is without me doing anything else to make it go any faster.