Small towns

Symphony No. 3; Quiet City; Aaron Copland, composer; New York Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, conducting

Bruce, my little home town in South Dakota, has a population of roughly two hundred seventy-five citizens. It has a physical size of about a half-mile square. Our farm sat about a mile to the east of town. Only the highest portion of the grain elevator could be seen from our farm, however, since the plateau on which our farm rested dropped to Big Sioux River valley level right before going into town. In 2002, Mom moved one and a half miles from the farm into town. The FAR side of town.

The elementary school that my sisters and I attended occupied the northwest corner of town. It closed in the spring of 1975, ten years after the junior high and high school joined the Sioux Valley school district. A gravel driveway divided our little elementary school plot into two sections. The three teachers who taught in our little school wouldn’t allow first and second graders to cross the driveway into the “big kid” section of the school property. I never liked that rule – until I entered the third grade. Then I liked that rule a lot. My sister K. attended all six years of her elementary education at the school. I finished the third grade and D. finished the second grade before we made the move to a larger classroom at the end of a longer bus ride.

The “local” industry in town belongs to R. Adee. He owns Adee Honey Farms, the largest beekeeping business in the United States. It also functions as one of the nation’s largest honey producers. In that spirit, the last weekend in July has the town come to brilliant life when Honey Days draws the community together for a parade, an auto show, a honey recipe contest, picnics, softball tournaments, a tractor show, an outdoor non-denominational church service and many more events.

The little town celebrated its one hundred twenty-fifth birthday during the summer of 2008 and made Honey Days its quasquicentennial celebration. They added two more days to their jamboree with a “Mr. Queen Bee” contest on Thursday evening and an all-school reunion on Friday. The streets practically burst with people, the likes of which the town hadn’t seen in twenty five years. The Longhorn Bar downtown held a ninety-six hour vigil in honor of the occasion.

On Sunday afternoon, Mom said, “You watch what happens this evening at nine o’clock.” At nine o’clock, the family gathered on Mom’s front porch. We heard no sounds. We saw no lights. The dogs were silent. The streets lay still. Our little town became a momentary Brigabruce.

Aaron Copland fused together parcels of incidental music that he composed for a play by Irwin Shaw called “Quiet City”. “Quiet City”, the resulting composition, features the trumpet, the English horn and a string orchestra. The trumpet represents the trumpet playing of the main character’s brother in the play. The play’s original run stopped, however, after only two performances in 1939. I don’t know if another production ever occurred. When I hear “Quiet City”, I can feel the tranquil, undisturbed, understated, maybe even undisclosing nature of a community of conscientious yet unobtrusive people.

Mom serves as the church secretary in the Grace Lutheran Church across the street from her house. Every month she publishes the newsletter and takes it to the post office for delivery. Six months after I moved to the DC area, my mom received good-natured interrogation from the post-mistress when she brought in the bunches of newsletters for delivery.

“Do you have a computer?” the post-mistress asked.

“Yes,” replied Mom.

“Do you get e-mail?”

“Yes.”

“Does your son e-mail you?”

“Why, yes, he does.”

“Well, that’s good, since he hasn’t sent you so much as a postcard since he left six months ago.”

Credits: To people who live in small towns, for mastering the art of living in a fish bowl.