Me: "I dunno, I kinda like them."
Mom: "Oh no, they're terrible. We don't want 'em."
Me: "Well, nobody really wants them in their back yard, but they've gotta go somewhere."
Mom: "But they wreck the soil. They drive the worms out when they pour the concrete pad, and that makes the farmland less productive."
Me: "It's a small price to pay for totally green electricity. Rather that than have coal spitting out carbon dioxide all over the place."
Mom: "Well, you don't know what it's like, you don't live here anymore."
And it's true, I don't, and I haven't lived in rural southwestern Ontario since 1996. But that's been stuck in my head the past few days, and I can't get it out.
Here's the crisis:
Am I a small-town person or a big-city person?
Naturally, my instinct in states of indecision or confusion is to draw a diagram. So I whipped up a spreadsheet and figured out how long I've been living in each place.
That's the basic idea. ("London," for the record, is the real one: London, Ontario. And I technically lived at RR#1 Deep River, but that's close enough.) There were various places in Waterloo and Kingston and Toronto that I've lived in, and technically I lived in pre-amalgamation North York for four months, but if it's the 416, let's classify it as Toronto.
This is a lot of colours, so we can simplify a bit. I'll consider Inwood and Deep River to be small towns; Waterloo, Kingston and London are small cities; Toronto and Calgary are big cities.
Small town still wins, but we're getting closer to 50-50. Finally, if we consider something to either be "a small town" or "not a small town," I think you know how this is going to go.
And there you have it. But, in my defence, my small-town years were my formative ones, so they probably count more than their 49% suggests. So, if I had to classify myself these days, let's go with...
Small-town roots but with a big-city veneer on top.
Yeah, I think that works alright.
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