When did you start thinking about more than your area?

The younger I was, the more expansive were my horizons.

I speak as someone who has just skipped across a region, and am mostly being quiet, learning.

I suggest such perception can start with the imagination, and then leach its way into what we might perceive as the real world (regions and all).

I've fluctuated. I think I started thinking on a world scale by my senior year in high school when I took a world demography course. I continued that trend for most of my adult life, though I dropped it for almost 10 years when I was absorbing two new cultures (the Southwest and the Southeast). Now I'm back to world view, but I am also much more oriented towards local business/politics/society than ever before.

I'm still thinking about it.


Oh wait. You meant "your area" as in "your town?"

I must be backward, cuz the older I got, the more global I thunk, and it started pretty early...

RH

(my town is kinda retro smallville)

There were big events (large effect on my outlook) and little events (casual observations).

The anti-busing demonstrations in Boston in 1974 was a big event. I was 18 at the time, living in mostly-white Vt, and naive enough to think that racism was restricted to the south. Another series of big events was making a number of trips to small island nations and meeting locals who either hated or embraced tourists -- strange feelings riding on the local buses with that one. A very large event for me was being on A2K during the last presidential election and seeing for the first time how much interest and concern folks from all over the world had on our elections. Brought home the realization that we gotta get it right 'cuz the whole world is affected.

Some of the little events include regional travel in this country. I noticed that mid-westerners speak v-e-r-y s--l--o--w--l--y in comparison to northeasterners; that you tend to take things for granted until you don't have them nearby any more (mountains, for me); that spring comes sooner in some places than others but a late-March trip takes the edge off cabin fever.

I'm sure there are others -- I'll keep thinking.

I'll toss one before I go to bed, for Osso, my great friend, who sometimes thinks I am but an assassin.

I remember being about 5, and listening to my folks crying because my dad hadda quit college, and was draft eligible.

Talk of Canada, and many things that only meant sense much later...

And my Uncle, the Viet Nam Vet who died two years after coming home, cuz he dint wanna live anymore...

RH

I get that as global and intimate, Rockhead.

Assassin?

Reminds me of a guy in italian class..






I'm a mess myself, an only child whose experience was in cities, different cities. The new thing for me was to get the idea of neighborhood in real life and that happened in the years I lived in Venice as an adult. And it happened well, and not obnoxiously.

I've spoken here before about my good life in Evanston, in the fifties, in a certain city block, but that was only a few years, when I was around nine/ten. Just an acquaintance with a neighborhood and how it can be, before tearing away. I still am in touch with the family across the street, and we were only renters.


My own problem, so to say, was not to reach out from my family and street to global, but to think regional.

(i'm a Regional thinker...)