friends in big and small towns

My first couple years downstate I didn't make many friends.  I came down with two fellow Gage Parkers but they both dropped out before they ended their first semester while I barely hung on.  Gage Park didn't prepare us well for the big U as we called it, and we were no match for the suburban kids who had learned more than we had and actually had study habits.

Eventually I started hanging out in an area in the student union called the Tavern.  It wasn't a real tavern of course, just made up to look like one with dark wood and all, and from there I moved on to real taverns and met my beer drinking buddies.  Those were heady times for me, a little like Cheers in that when I waked in everybody called my name.  As the years went on, closing down the bar every night became less important than things like jobs and marriages to a lot of my beer drinking buddies and I no longer knew everyone in the bar.

I was almost forty when I moved to Texas, but I thought that I could just start hanging out in a bar and I'd meet people and before long I'd have a bunch of beer drinking buddies, but that never happened.  Everybody in the bar already knew each other and they'd rather talk to their old buddies than some new guy who didn't know anybody.  I didn't make any new friends there,

And now I've lived in Chicago for thirty years and I have made friends of people in my watercolor class and improv and neighbors, but not all that many.  The true measure of friendship (I sort of joke, but not entirely) is who are your friends on fb, and roughly two-thirds of mine are people I met in Champaign.


Talking to Ruby Dew about her childhood social circle I was surprised to hear about all the rules as to who could associate with who.  Back in the hood there were no such rules.  Well there were some kids who were cooler than other kids, but that was kind of a meritocracy.  A cool kid could fall from grace and an uncool kid could turn out to have a good glove and become cool.  Your parents never told you don't hang out with that kid, and other parents didn't tell their kids not to hang with you.  .

Like I said in the bungalow belt all the houses were the same so all the people who lived in them made about the same amount of money and money was the main determinator of class and that's why we were relatively classless.  Another idea pops into mind while I write this.  There was also the matter that there were so many of us.  If you didn't get along with the kids on your block you could always move on down to the next block.  But in a small town there was no other block, you were stuck with the kids you had and everybody knew everybody else so the rules became kind of rigid.

There is that whole thing where in a small town everybody looks out for each other, but also everybody looks at each other and you have to act like everybody else wants you to and some people don't like that.