Visiting Virginia

I've done something for most of my adult life. Whenever I visit somewhere cool, I start planning to move there. And every time I come through Virginia or West Virginia, the area where my father was born, I start making plans. Today I even convinced my husband...almost.

We stopped off at Staunton, Virginia for breakfast on our way to New York for my step-son's wedding. My Dad was born about 40 miles from Staunton in the tiny hamlet of Blue Grass. Every summer of my childhood, we visited this area for a two-week vacation. His family still lives here, though those I knew are mostly all dead.

So, it was innocent enough. I just said, "Let's stop in Staunton real quick for breakfast" and he took the exit. Soon enough he found the Beverly Restaurant in the historic downtown district and we went in and had a nice breakfast. We'd been there before on a previous trip.


The cook was a black man, quite funny, who sang and the waitress began dancing which sent the cook into a fit of laughter that he had to go outside to stop. We watched him through the tall front windows.

I started noticing some very interesting, characters: People walking down the street who were just obviously open-minded, you know? You can tell. A tall guy with a faded, blue do-rag on his head. Two 30-ish business men who smiled at me through the window as they passed because I happened to be smiling at something Freddy had just said. A mother with three kids dressed in a style I admire (I even took their picture).



You have to understand something, first. I'm stifled. I live in a small-minded little town in Arkansas where everybody loves guns and drives 4-wheelers and hates Obama. And, though I dearly love some of them, and I mean really and truly love them as much as I love my family, I feel like I'm drowning in...conservatism (is that a word? Somehow it looks really weird, right now.)

So we leave the restaurant and walk down the street and we see art galleries and a vintage clothing store and Fair Trade Coffee shops and places like this...


...and this:


And I stop in a health food store to look for one of those free papers that list the local happenings and which give you a feel for the grassroots of a place and I start talking to the owner, a friendly, red-headed guy with a baby on his shoulder. And then a trio of young people follow me out to the street to tell me where the Shakespeare Center is and other attractions. One girl, rather butchy, had a myriad of tattoos and one huge, quite exquisite one of Jesus on the left side of her neck. You don't see people like that where I live. And you don't see any black people, or not many. And I'm getting older and I'm tired and I've been through a tornado now and I just want to get on with my life. I did this and I'm ready to do some new stuff. Only, that's probably not gonna happen because my husband only stayed convinced to move to Staunton for about 45 minutes, and then he began to crawdad on me.

He did say he could live in Eureka Springs, though........