It's a small world after all*

I grew up in a very small town, where a good portion of the population knew a good portion of the rest of the population. It was no Stars Hollow or Walnut Grove, but still it was near impossible to go anywhere in town with my mother without having to wait impatiently while she stopped to talk with some neighbor or church acquaintance or client of my father's. In a town that size, it wasn't at all uncommon to run into a teacher from my school while shopping at Food Mart, or to see the Food Mart cashier in the line at the bank or browsing at the video store. The dentist, the eye doctor, the photographer for the local paper--all of these people walked among us and were part of a common community. It was all very "Who are the people in your neighborhood?"--For me, they really were "the people that you meet, when you're walking down the street, the people that you meet each day."

When I moved to the Twin Cities, I quickly grew accustomed to the anonymity of a big city. I might, on occasion, recognize someone from my college at the bars downtown, but I never went in to Target or Rainbow Foods expecting to see anyone I knew. My friends, coworkers, and various acquaintances were scattered across Minneapolis, St. Paul, and its various surrounding suburbs, and with 27 different Target stores within the radius of my daily commute, the chances of any of us picking the same one at the same time have always been very slim.

It's not that I don't want some feeling of community and familiarity. I actually felt a little more at home here when I ran into my mechanic from the Amoco station at the mall one night and when I encountered a woman from my yoga class at a grocery store near my home. Still, for the most part, my life is neatly segmented into individual realms, and I'm very used to seeing little or no cross-over between them.

That's why it's so weird to work where I work. The city where my office is housed is, for all practical purposes, a suburb, but it's the kind of suburb that became a suburb only because the rest of the metropolitan area grew out to meet it. I am fairly confident that Rochester, Minnesota (nearly 90 miles away) will one day be considered a suburb of Minneapolis by the very same logic. Suburban sprawl is funny that way.

Unlike most suburbs, however, which have no sidewalks, far too many cul de sacs, and virtually no non-chain restaurants or retail establishments, the suburb where I work remains, largely, an independent, self-contained city in the old-fashioned, traditional sense. They let me in and out freely every day without going through Customs or showing a visitor's pass, but I get the very strong feeling that the majority of the people I encounter when I walk downtown or run an errand over lunch both live and work within the city limits. And even though those city limits house some 17,000 people, it's not at all uncommon for me to see the same person twice.

I go to Target, and three out of five times, it's the same small, friendly woman who rings up my purchases. At the post office, I know it's going to be either Mary or Joe who weighs my package or sells me my stamps. What I'm not used to, however, is the crossover when these people show up in places other than their appointed posts. It's like Mr. Rogers stopping in at Mr. McFeely's house instead of the other way around. It just wouldn't be right for Fred to walk in on Mr. McFeely just hanging out at home, having a beer and doing a crossword puzzle, wearing sweats or a cardigan, with his Speedy Delivery man hat nowhere in sight.

I should get to the point, I suppose. The truth is I really have no problem at all running into my postal worker at the grocery store or seeing my bank teller at a cafe. I'm really not that terrified of the "worlds colliding" phenomenon. My problem (like so many of the problems I feel the need to write about, apparently) is with the health club. There's a fine line, I think, between accepting the necessity of getting undressed and dressed in the company of total strangers and feeling comfortable in that same scenario when those people are not quite strangers. When we're all anonymous individuals who exist only within the walls of the club, I can go through the locker room motions without really much thought. But when the woman two lockers down is the lady who'll sell me my stamps tomorrow or the unnaturally tan girl who was behind me in line at the sandwich shop the other day, it feels a little too weird. I don't particularly want to see my bank teller naked, and I really don't feel comfortable with her seeing me in all my no-clothes glory either. Call me crazy; it just feels a little odd.

I remember back in college, one of my roommates came home one day very disturbed because an apparently rather ugly-footed professor had worn sandals to her lecture. My roommate for some reason couldn't help but focus on the feet, and she didn't feel at all comfortable with what she saw. "You should never see a professor's feet," she announced with authority and decision. Today I say that the same holds true for a postal worker's cellulite, I think.


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* My sincerest apologies if the use of this subject line puts the Small World song in your head for the next 72 hours. Really.