Small Town Girl (Gabrielle)
September 26, 2008 by sharppointythings
I was writing the blog post about how everything’s changing and I realized something that would never fit into that post so I’m giving it its very own post.
In many ways I think my growing up experience is closer to the small town feel than it is to the suburban feel. I always assumed I’d grown up in a suburban neighborhood, but I think I actually grew up in a small town.
When I was growing up there were two major milestones in our freedom of movement. When I was five I was allowed to cross our street, Smithson Avenue, by myself and when I was eight I was allowed to cross Main Street by myself. Well, I was supposed to be eight, but I was seven and my mom needed someone to mail a letter for her and there wasn’t anyone else at home. So she told me to be very careful and to look both ways and she sent me to the mailbox which was on the other side of Main St. It was on the other side of Iroquois Avenue, too, but once I was allowed to cross Main St all other roads were open to me.
After that Lawrence Park was completely open to me. I would just wander. I’d pop down to the library and sit there for a while. There were playgrounds to walk to, a creek that flowed from just a few blocks away all the way down to the lake. There were two schools with large parking lots to ride bikes in or roller skate in and one, the high school, was right behind our house. My sisters, our friend and I would spend entire summer days just bopping around Lawrence Park and amusing ourselves. In the winter we would play on the snow mounds the snow plows made in the high school parking lot.
When I got my rollerblades and got over my fear of hills ( a funny story in itself) even more of my little town was open to me. The golf course with direct access to the lake had been a long walk, but now with wheels it was very manageable. Almost every day I would skate the boundaries of my little town like a ranger on his rounds. It was my space and it was big enough to hold my interest.
I live in the city now and sometimes I feel bad for how the children are growing up. There isn’t a good place for them to ride their bikes. We have a concrete slab in the backyard so they have some space, but it just isn’t the same. I’ll walk the bounds of my neighborhood from time to time, but there’s no way they’d ever be allowed to. At least not until the boys are a lot bigger. I was talking to Adiel about this and she said that she wouldn’t let her children do as much as Dad and Mom let us simply because times have changed. I’m not sure I would let me do now what I did then. I used to roller blade down the middle of Main St at midnight. Well, I did it a couple of times. There wasn’t any traffic and it was exhilarating. And stupid.
It feels sometimes like the world has shrunk. There are just a few places, if any, left on Earth that we can’t get to and yet our day-to-day world has shrunk. At least, mine has. I moved from a small town to a city and yet the space I have to roam is has shrunk. Maybe that’s one reason not to look back.
I’ve always thought of Lawrence Park as a small town rather than a suburb. What else would you call a place with a “Main Street” lined with all manner of small businesses and offices, a small library, its own small police station, complete set of schools, churches dotted here and there, etc.?
Suburbs are places where there are rows and rows of houses on side streets intersected by unwalkable thoroughfares full of businesses, maybe office buildings, churches with big parking lots — but the assumption is that nobody walks to get where they’re going, other than to a neighbor’s house. LP is nothing like that.
It only makes sense that LP has the character of a town, since it was built as a self-contained town.
The odd thing is that I now live in a neighborhood smack in the middle of the City of Erie that is more like a suburban neighborhood than a city. We’re just all mixed up around here!