Plum Crazy

I have arrived here in West Des Moines, Iowa for a business trip. I'll be heading to the office tomorrow, but right now I'm exhausted. This is the first time I've been to Iowa, and there's not much I can tell you about it yet. My only observations to date are: It's cold. It's windy. It's flat. The people are friendly. The first two clearly are related to the time of year. The last two are not. At least I hope not, since it would be rather scary if, during the summer, Iowa became mountainous and the people turned into raving lunatics. But that's something best left to a Stephen King novel, not real life.

One of the odd things about being a native New Yorker is how weird you feel when you leave the New York metropolitan area. It's a very different kind of life outside the hustle and bustle of New York City. Even other large cities in the U.S. don't move at the same breakneck speed, although they come closer. I won't say that this is the "real America", because that would imply that I live in some mock America, which I do not. Downstate New York and its environs are still part of the United States. I'm just as real an American as someone from the Midwest or the South. We may have different lifestyles and different beliefs, but for all that, we are, every one of us, real Americans. [Spare me the reminder that there are New Yorkers who feel superior to Midwesterners and Southerners. I know that. Just as there are Midwesterners and Southerners who feel superior to New Yorkers. There's no dearth of that in either direction.]

It's a slower pace of life, though, and that takes some getting used to for a native New Yorker. We have to reset our expectations and our pace. That's harder than it might sound. It's not necessarily relaxing, because frustration doesn't breed relaxation. One of the reasons I often limit my personal travel to big cities is that I like the speed of a big city. I'm used to it. I find it difficult to give it up. I never understand New Yorkers who insist that they want to get away from the problems of New York for a while, go out to a more rural area and expect service to be as fast as it is in New York. The speed and the hassles of big city living are inextricably intertwined. If you want to escape the hassles, you have to give up the speed.

So today, when I stopped off at a Starbucks cafe in a Barnes & Noble here, I took a deep breath. I was the only person in line and was in the midst of completing my transaction, when the manager walked up and decided that would be the perfect time to count the money in the cash register. At first, I started thinking "What the hell? Couldn't you have waited until I finished making my purchase? We were nearly done." Then I reminded myself I wasn't in New York and the extra few minutes wouldn't really matter.

Besides, there was something quite comforting about seeing a Barnes & Noble near my hotel. I don't have any friends in this area, so it was something recognizable in the midst of the unfamiliar. I welcomed it like a long-lost brother. Perusing its familiar bookshelves and the unchanging store layout, I felt warm, I felt happy, I felt really tired. [Okay, that last one probably had more to do with getting up at 5:30 am and the two flights I had to take to get here.] Small, local bookstores do have a charm you will never find in a monolith like Barnes & Noble. But when you're away from home, it's just nice to see something well-known.