Waco Pride

Last week my brother wrote a two-part blog post about hometown pride (here’s part one and part two). 

For background, we both moved from Waco, Texas to Edina, Minnesota in the summer of 2010, when he was 14 and I was 13. They’re both places that I’ve pretended not to be from at various periods in my life, but for very different reasons. When I moved to Minnesota I told people I was from “somewhere in Texas” because I didn’t want to field questions about the Branch Davidian fiasco and, later, about the fertilizer plant fiasco and the biker shootout fiasco (Waco is sort of a city of fiascos). When I went to Grinnell I told people I was from Minneapolis, at first because I didn’t want to deal with the cake-eater comments and later because I didn’t want to be linked to the Young Conservatives Club fiasco (which, granted, is very local news, but it’s still hard to live down). 

In his blog post my brother talked about how he felt out of place and trapped in Waco, both of which I understand. Our family is deeply midwestern and liberal, so much so that ten years in Waco didn’t change our accents or political leanings one bit (aside from the time when my baby sitter gave me a very biased explanation of how abortions work). I understand feeling like an outsider because not spending our summers at a ranch and not having a family gun stash put us far outside the norm in our elementary school. As for being trapped, the feeling was very literal. Our family lived in a tiny neighborhood bordered on every side by busy streets where drivers had a loose interpretation of the meaning of crosswalks. Without a driver’s license, there weren’t many places you could go.

But even though I know where my brother is coming from on this, I can never see things the same way. For me, Edina will always just be a town. A very nice town, but nothing more than that. Waco, though, Waco is home. Waco feels sacred. Just looking through old photos, or going down the streets on google maps, my neighborhood, my school, the genie-themed car wash we drove by on our way to church, they all seem imbued with some special meaning that I’ve never been able to articulate. 

I first tried to articulate it in a short story that I wrote when I attended the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio the summer between my junior and senior years in high school. It was the first thing I’d ever written that felt like real writing and it ended up being the first piece of fiction published in Inklette Magazine. Like everything I’ve ever written, I can’t stand looking at it. The dialogue is unrealistic, the ending comes off as simultaneously preachy and confusing, and I never really answered the main question of the story: why is this guy so attached to his hometown? The closest I came, I think, was when he suggested that it was beautiful because you had to look to find the beauty rather than having it given to you. That’s part of the answer, but not the whole thing. It doesn’t explain how to find that beauty. To get that you have to go back to the first thing I ever wrote.

Last week I posted a novel I wrote when I was five or six which was, at its best, incomprehensible. You wouldn’t know it because I never described the setting, but it was all supposed to take place in a footpath near the suspension bridge where I used to play with my friend Emily, specifically in this red-brick tunnel blocked by metal bars. If I passed it today I probably wouldn’t think anything of it, but back then we were sure that there was something strange and magical down that tunnel and we were always looking for the key that would open it. The world my brother longed for was a world where it snowed in the winter and kids rode their bikes wherever they wanted in the summer. For me, it was whatever lay at the end of that tunnel, or the planet where the imaginary alien friend loop-de-joop came from, or all the magical worlds I imagined superimposed over my everyday world. I guess Micah got the better end of the bargain, he actually got the world he wanted, but I’m still grateful for what I had.

I don’t think that any place has an essential essence that can be summed up in a few sentences. I made some of my best friends in Waco and some more in Edina, and there are plenty of jerks in both. A place only means as much as your experience there, and my time in Waco meant more to me than I can ever properly describe.