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May 10, 2005
I’d Like to Write a Blog Entry of Great Social and Political Import
I always tell people that I grew up in Kendall, but, of course, that’s a brazen lie. The house I lived in was truly in Hamlin, a mile east of the Orleans County line, which is itself a good mile or so east of Kendall. Hamlin doesn’t have a school district of its own, so its children are divided between the Hilton, Brockport, and Kendall schools; those children, in turn, end up identifying with the town where they go to school more than the one in which they live. What united most people in Hamlin when I was young was a shared fondness for Krony’s pizza and apple fritters from Bob’s. And we had a fireman’s carnival every year with a parade and fireworks. That’s pretty much it. Growing up like that, I was very aware of borders: where the school districts began and ended, where the phone numbers went from 964 to 659, whose house was long-distance (Tammy), who lived in Orleans County and who lived in Monroe, what fire department would come to your house if it was burning down. These boundaries were the subject of much discussion as they affected practical things like where you went to school and how much you’d be charged for a phone call. I, myself, was always fascinated with the county line and the notion that you could cross it by simply walking from Heidi Snook’s across the road to Brian Shade’s – even though it all looked like the same place to me. My life has always had a lot of fuzzy corners, and I wonder if it’s one of the reasons I prefer writing to math, fluidity to precision, flexibility to rules. It’s hard to know why you end up the way you do, but, like my long a’s, maybe it’s just another one of the side-effects of growing up in the middle of nowhere.
Posted by adrienne at May 10, 2005 07:16 PM
Comments
Wow you've caused me to remember and even think about the fact that I lived quite near the Ohio/Michigan border when I was a kid. In fact as a teen I worked for my Dad and had to cross the state line to do it. I was obsessed about noticing every time I drove across the line, and to this day I like pointing out to my kids stuff like, "see Uncle Tom's backyard, right past those trees is Michigan". The coolest thing was turning 18 and being able to go out drinking (legally) just a mile from home, even though in Ohio I had to be 21 to do it.
Posted by: wplmom at May 10, 2005 07:29 PM
As kids we were always very aware of the school district boundaries, because a)they kept changing and b)they determined if we got to stay with our friends or not. My friends and I got split between the two middle schools in the district (the only elementary school that gets split)and desparately prayed that they wouldn't do something idiotic like build a second high school, so we could all be together again in high school.
We missed the idiocy by one year. And I thank God every night for that.
Posted by: Sarah H at May 10, 2005 09:27 PM
Unlike Sarah I thank god frequently that the borders of the Kendall district were so inclusive otherwise I would have had just Brian, Chuck and Vickie and well we know how that all turned out. Maybe you should start Librarians Without Borders.
Of course that stupid long distance rule still applies to your 889 #.
Posted by: tonderdo at May 13, 2005 05:16 PM
To me, what defined Hamlinites was that they all seemed to live in new houses. Basically, I put everyone in Monroe county in this category, regardless of the age of their actual dwelling.
In my mind, Kendall was country and Hamlin was suburban. This is all based on the 1 mile of newer houses on Redman road and Church road. In my mind, all of those people were rich and had cable and HBO on big-screen TVs.
They did get cable about a decade before Kendall.
To go to Mike or Kevin's house was like stepping into a different country. Their carpets were nice, their basements were living spaces, not dusty, smelly dungeons, they had VCRs and MTV and video games and paved driveways that you could use a scateboard on. And their parents' cars were parked indoors overnight. They had "city water," which I would have killed for, even though my parents always used "city water" as a derogitory term. Though that wore thin the winter that something fell in our well and died at the same time that the lights quit working in the bathroom, so you had to shower by the light of a flashlight in the stench of decomposing possum carcass. I was pretty sure Hamlinites never had to do that.
Posted by: chuck at August 30, 2006 12:34 PM
Well, we had city water at my house, but our basement was one of those scary places best avoided and we didn't have cable available on our street until about two months before I graduated. Kevin's family might have had satellite -- I don't rightly remember -- but I *do* remember that they had a really wonderfully large collection of BETA movies.
Posted by: adrienne at August 30, 2006 06:12 PM
They must have had satellite, Jeffrey had cable way before us. You must have gotten it that same time I did. I know now that not everyone in Hamlin was a suburbanite, but that was just my impression as a kid.
Posted by: chuck at August 31, 2006 09:51 AM
I remember that BETA collection.
Posted by: chuck at August 31, 2006 10:18 AM
I remember thinking that it was absolutely amazing that someone could own that much of something. And, of course, there was always something cool to watch at their house. You didn't even need to bother going to Bobs to rent something.
Posted by: adrienne at August 31, 2006 06:24 PM