I'm Suffering From City Envy

Even Though Yours Is Smaller Than Mine

I feel it is time to reveal something to you all, something that I have kept secretly hidden and something that I must bring out into the light. I am an interloper, a stranger in your midst. With the exception of my ability to swear like a stevedore with Tourette’s syndrome and my inability to patiently wait for a train to pass, I am virtually indistinguishable from any number of Tipp City residents, yet I am not from among your numbers. I actually reside in (dare I say it?)…Dayton!

Not only do I reside in Dayton, my home is within a one mile radius of almost every horrible story that you hear about on the news. Usually, the criminal activity is mere blocks from where I raise my children. There are things that I have seen there that should make me cringe in horror, but these events have sadly (and tragically) become merely commonplace.

I am not bringing this up to create for myself a jaded, big city persona nor do I seek to garner pity from anyone. This is only meant to serve as an explanation for my views and reactions to some of the events and concerns of Tipp City, because I have, at times, come across as callous or aloof when these concerns have been voiced to me. In my defense, it’s not callousness, but sheer bewilderment.

I find the Tipp City Independent Voice’s Police Blotter hilarious, not only because of Woody’s take on what would otherwise be dry, flat news, but also due to the nature of the crimes. In the same week that the Tipp City Independent Voice ran a police story about a mother who called the police to have them talk to her child about the dangers of posting YouTube videos, there were several shooting fatalities within blocks of my house. It’s not so much that I’m downplaying the mother’s concerns over the potential for a predator to use her son’s information to possibly bring harm to him; I’m just flabbergasted that she got a cop to show up! There was a shootout that occurred several years ago in which the gunmen ran through my yard firing at each other. Sadly, they were horrible shots and missed each other, but the amazing thing is, the cops never showed up. They actually called about a week and a half later to take a report over the phone!
I thoroughly enjoy working…well, sitting, talking and generally wasting time…at the Tipp City Independent Voice’s booth at the farmer’s market every Saturday. I watch everyone interact, most knowing each other by name. At the Artisan Fair, everyone that came up to our booth had praise for our paper and engaged us in conversation that ranged from daily pleasantries to historical tidbits about the town. I took my family to the Fourth of July fireworks in Tipp City and we stood in awe, not only because of the wonderful display (and the Stephen King-like creeping fog that formed from the smoke shortly thereafter) but because of the cordial and complimentary manner in which everybody treated each other.

I realized that this is what I wanted. I want my kids to go to a school where I didn’t have to receive phone calls that the school is in lockdown because some crack addled parent has threatened to come up to the school and wreak havoc. I want to live in a place where when I greet someone on the street, I’m not immediately accosted and harangued for the change in my pocket. I want to live in a place where my family is not awakened at four o’clock in the morning to the sounds of the lesbian drug addicts that live next door as they scream and throw the contents of their apartment at high velocity out the window. I would love to take my children out of all of that, yet money and other circumstances have conspired against me and that goal seems very far away indeed.

Am I ranting and railing against my own personal ring in the vast inferno? No. Am I looking for someone to save me from my own situation? No. Am I envious over what others have here? Possibly, but I would never admit it. Then what exactly am I writing about?

What I hope to achieve, at least momentarily, is to hold a rather large mirror up to Tipp City so that everyone knows and fully appreciates what they have here. Tipp City has a sense of community, a sense of enmity, a sense of exactly who and what they are and, most importantly, a deeply ingrained sense of where they came from and where they want to go. Sometimes, when I come up here to work out of the office, I have to remind myself that I’m not in Mayberry (although that was difficult the day that Andy Griffith’s police cruiser was parked in front of Tony’s Bada Bings) and that eventually I will have to drive fifteen minutes south and a whole world away.

I grew up in what was once a small town: Bellbrook, OH. Developers and money men created a “small town” for those who had the money, erecting plats of $200,000 plus homes, thereby forcing out almost everybody I grew up with there. Now there is a sense of alienation when I go back there now. A sense that I don’t belong, that I am considered quaintly provincial in the eyes of the new breed of landowners that seek a small town atmosphere without the inconvenience of having to drive more than several blocks for a Starbucks Mocha Choco-latte. What followed after the forced façade of rural living was developed were traffic issues, water shortages and sewage problems coupled with a not so small foreclosure predicament as people reached for a dream that was just that: a dream.

Tipp City, hold on to your community. Hold on to your history. Hold on to your values. These seemingly inconsequential things comprise the bricks and mortar of the dam holding back the deluge threatening to sweep you down into the maelstrom with the rest of us…and the rain shows no signs of letting up.

(This article was originally published in the May 4, 2008 edition of the Tipp City Independent Voice.)