This weekend I brought a friend from the little town where I live to visit New York and stay with my very dear friend in Brooklyn, and we had a nice time enjoying the fruits of the city. We ate foods we can’t get in our town, went to a great old movie, walked around Prospect Park, and drank good margaritas. It was nice! We kept noticing how, unlike in our town, New Yorkers do tend to look pretty great as adults. Our town does not have an overwhelming number of great-looking grown-ups in it.

But something odd happened to us as our train got closer and closer to home. My friend and I grasped one another’s hands as we sailed past the farms and hills outside our town. Horses! Donkeys! Mules! Cows! Look at that old old train car in that field! Look at the way the sunlight falls on that farmhouse! We’ll be home so soon!

Both of us had spent the previous decade in the big cities of our childhood dreams, on opposite coasts, living out the fantasy of life in public, dating artists and writers and musicians, coming home—if at all—at dawn after deciding on a whim to be out all night. We met people and threw them away, or were thrown away ourselves, for no reason at all. We bitched about everything because in an environment of maximum density, we could always find some pleasure more refined than the last.

Over a lunch of omelets in a diner near the train station, we tried to come up with ways to describe our love of small-town life. Would it be possible to communicate why it’s so great to someone who can’t imagine leaving the city, someone much like ourselves less than a year ago? That is, you wouldn’t want to convince them to leave, but just to respect your enjoyment of something else. Certainly most small-town people can imagine New York being right for someone else. Can city folk imagine what we love?

It most closely reminded me of a time when a woman who lived in my building in Brooklyn told me, over our ritual weekly glass of bourbon, that she was in love with a man. Oh please, I said. A month before she’d picked up some cokehead lawyer to screw her in the ass after a gallery opening. Tell me about this “love.” Well, they’d met at a wedding, and he asked to see her again after sharing a dance. He got reservations at a nice restaurant, where they talked and ate and had good wine. He took her home and didn’t kiss her yet, but invited her to breakfast the next day before he flew back across the country, and they did kiss, and now she’s in love and going to move to marry him. I couldn’t see it. She might as well have been speaking random syllables for all I understood. That is really weird, I said.

Our small town, my friend and I decided, is like having some new boyfriend who’s really dependable and likes your company and is fun to be around but gives you space without being creepy or passive-aggressive about it. And when you try to explain your love to people who’ve known you and the kinds of guys you go for, it just sounds way too healthy and sane to hold any interest.

…but you can also enjoy such wonders as “Evolution of US Breakfast Cereals“…

…”Typewriter Erotica, 1920s“…

… “Soviet Car Ads, 1960s / 1970s” …

…or “Black Cat auditions in Hollywood, 1961.”

Bonus video:  A friend sent me this video of her friend appearing on Jimmy Kimmel to show off his macaroni-and-cheese box collection. I was worried at first that Jimmy Kimmel and his guest Andy Garcia were going to be cruel. But there’s a sweet moment at the end, and I do believe the mac-and-cheese man comes off quite well.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Backyard Birds