As regular readers know, we moved this summer, from Fort Wayne, Indiana to Birmingham, Alabama. It’s been interesting and generally fantastic.
When I meet folks down here and go through the obligatory “Yeah, we just moved from Indiana….” etc., I often get a sort of concerned look in response.  Concerned, I think, as to how we are adapating to The South. I hasten to assure them that we are, indeed, no strangers to The South. I moved to Knoxville at 13, went to UT and Vanderbilt, lived in Virginia and Florida, Michael lived in Florida for ages, and really, the anomaly was the Indiana Years (despite the fact, as my husband will quickly remind me, I was born in Bloomington. I was, I was.)
I assure them of this, as well as of the fact that we are positively thrilled to be here for a number of reasons, including the fact that we could list the FW house for sale with snow shovels included.
But we are happy to be here for other reasons, too. I’ve no doubt that enumerating them will offend Fort Wayne loyalists, but so be it. It was, in short, one of the oddest places I’ve ever lived. I still cannot figure it out. For the life of me, I can’t. It wasn’t awful or bad. It was just strange, honestly.
When Fort Wayne first loomed in my future, I looked it up, and noted, “Second Largest City in Indiana.” Well, I reasoned, that’s got to be good news. Nashville, after all, is the second-largest city in Tennessee, and that’s a great town. So, it must translate. Even a little bit. Right?
Wrong.
I think it’s important to point out some positive aspects of The Fort. I would say, in all honesty, that it is an excellent place to raise children – up to a point, that point being the teen years when the secondary school options really shrank and wobbled in quality.
We lived in one of the older parts of the city, in a real neighborhood with sidewalks and a neighborhood church and school and a fantastic park one block away from my house. It was safe (at least it felt safe) – it was…a neighborhood.  (A part of the city, though, I feel moved to point out though, that we were warned against. Oh, you don’t want to live in the South Side. My Translation: Black people live there. Hispanics, too. The horror.)
Most of the daily tasks (except for Michael driving to work) occurred within a 2-mile radius of the house. There were lots of things to do with children, even if those things were relatively small in scale and repeated themselves every year. Children don’t remember. They don’t care. Everything is new to them, every day. The Fort Wayne Zoo was small, but really excellent, and a fantastic place to take my boys and just let them run and race and practically pet the kangaroos.  Great library.
Beyond that, the place just never grabbed me.  It didn’t threaten to kill my soul and I certainly wasn’t “unhappy” at all – I had two babies, wrote 16 books, etc., But there was a flatness about life that puzzled me.
(I take it back about the zoo and the library being the top selling points – add “affordable” to the mix. If you want a ridiculously large amount of house for your money, go to Fort Wayne. More specifically, go to Fort Wayne and buy my house – please.)
A story: The job Michael had up there was previously held by a fellow who, when he first had the job, commuted, in a way, on a weekly basis, from a town about two hours away. At one point he decided that this was silly and that he would just move to Fort Wayne. He and his family lasted a year and then went back to the university town where they had originally lived. He spoke of the parochialism of the area. I wondered if he was just being a snob. (Sorry, Jim!)
After about a year myself, I got it.
Although in a way, I still don’t get it.
I’ve visited most, if not all of the major cities in the Midwest. Trust me, Fort Wayne is…different. I don’t know how you characterize a town. I don’t know on what basis you can generalize or describe a gestalt, an identity for a collection of 250,000 people.
I’ll charge into the breach.  There is just this very settled, insular sensibility.  From year to year (and we lived there 8), nothing much changed. A few more chain restaurants came into town, a couple left. Noises were made about downtown redevelopment, but nothing much happened (until this past year when a development centered on a new baseball stadium for the town’s AA team was constructed downtown – Harrison Square – I wish it well.) During the summer there are festivals in Headwaters Park, close to downtown, almost every week, but even they bear a certain stasis. I’ve been to GermanFest every year for seven years, and every single year, the 6 or 7 vendors of Teutonic Trinkets were arrayed in the exact same L-shaped arrangement on the west end of the grounds. Unchanging. Nothing new.
I take that back. Things did change. From my vantage point in the South Side, the Hispanic and Asian populations exploded. Interesting little panaderias and taquerias opened, as did things like a Burmese coffee shop and a Nation of Islam prayer center and Burmese Buddhist temples and such, hardly any of which was ever noted by the local media. Invisible under the shadow of Germanfest or a golf tournament or the latest touring production of a tribute band to some 70’s rock band.
Eh, this sounds petty and silly. I’ll keep trying and maybe Nance can chime in (if she’s not ticked off from the political rant I shot her way earlier today) and help me. Okay, I’ll just put it this way:
(And you probably should know that these comments echo the conversations I’ve been reading in Fort Wayne-based blogs for years. The questions and frustrations and puzzlement about Fort Wayne’s identity and life is not unique to me. People who live there have these conversations and ask these questions – all the time. It is part of trying to understand how to bring economic life back to the area instead of just standing watching it walk away.)
It is very hard to get in and out of Fort Wayne, to and from interesting places. Looking at the map, from the bird’s-eye, you’d think it wouldn’t be so bad. Chicago doesn’t look so far, and neither do the Ohio “C” cities or even Detroit.
But they are. They don’t have to be, but they are – because there is no direct interestate route to any of them except Detroit. It should take about 2. 5 hours to get to Chicago – if there was a direct interestate. But you have to go on state roads, through stupid towns, stopping at lights along the way. Same for Cleveland, for Columbus, for Cincinnati.  Neither does an Interestate go directly through Fort Wayne – I read once that the reason this was so was that it was felt that it would contribute to exacerbating neighborhood racial segregation – to divide the city with interestate highways. Guess what.  It’s segregated anyway.
So the upshot is that it takes a ridiculous amount of time to get out of Fort Wayne and then once you bust out of the city limits, you have to drive on state roads behind semis, stopping at a zillion lights to actually get anywhere else.
And don’t get me started on the airport. Okay, you already did – an airport that is continually whining and trying to guilt the good people of Fort Wayne to fly from the Fort Wayne International Airport and not, say Indy or even Columbus but somehow cannot attract a discount airline and hence competition to stay for longer than three months.
The point? The difficulty of leaving Fort Wayne always seemed to me to be expressive of some deep-seated fear that people would, indeed leave Fort Wayne, revealing, even more deeply, a fear and lack of understanding that a city’s life depends on risk. You risk opening the gate because you hope and trust that some of whom will leave will return with interesting ideas and also because you are not afraid of the new. You make it hard to leave a place, you’re also making it hard to come. And maybe that’s what you want, but it’s obvious to most people that what makes a city interesting is movement, diversity and change. A city, it seems to me, as a choice. You can make travel to and from your joint easy, or difficult.  Fort Wayne, for some reason, chose B somewhere along the way, and that, to me, holds a powerful symbolism.
Personally, I blame it on the Amish.
Just kiding. Sort of.
There is a fairly substantial Amish population in Northern Indiana, and I finally came to wonder if the Germans who settled and shaped Fort Wayne, even if they were not actually Amish or Mennnonite, still bore a bit of that suspicious, stubborn, closed-in, parochial sensibility. There’s a fear of giving you too much access to the outside world – it might look too pretty, it might attract you, and you might want to escape. Can’t have that. So we will decline the direct interstate links, we will not develop the rivers that run right through the middle of town and that, in any other city, are a center of life and development, and we will resent the new.
Let me try to explain this another way.
In the area in which we lived, there was a school. A couple of schools with which we were acquainted, to which we were connected. Most of the adults connected to these schools had actually attended the schools as children and teens, and some of their parents had done the same.
The resultant culture was rather inbred and closed to the newcomer. As I explained to my (sometimes frustrated and hurt) daughter many times, I really believe that what we could see in this is that dynamic of how our greatest strength can be our greatest weakness, as well. A community needs continuity, stability and tradition.  It is good for an institution like a school to have deep roots, to have a stadium filled on a Friday night with alumni watching their grandsons heave a football and their granddaughters play in the band or cheer.  One of the most wonderful teachers any of my children have had was Joseph’s kindergarten teacher who had attended his school herself and sent her own children through it. She was deeply committed, faith-filled and a rock.
But. How easy it is for the “close-knit” community to settle. To come to believe that its reason for existence extends no further than the comfort and satisfaction of those Friday nights filled with familiar faces and rituals. For close-knit to evolve into clannishness, pure and simple.
No matter where you live, I bet you can see the temptation in some group in which you are involved- your parish, a spiritual movement in which you are involved…what have you. It’s the constant dynamic of human interaction and connection.
An odd place, that Fort Wayne. A nice zoo. Great park near my house. Fantastic library. Fr. Widmann – we miss you, definitely, with your pithy, to-the-point 6-minute homilies. But you’d be one of kind, anywhere.
In conclusion:
Phew.
(Wipes brow. And not just from the Alabama heat.)
And that whole thing about your greatest strength perhaps being your weakness, as well?
Something to think about, I’m thinking, for towns and people, both. And churches, as well, something we’ve discussed here often. The sacramental/ritual/hierarchical structure of Catholicism keeps it relatively steady, but tempts us to neglect the personal aspect of faith. The personal focus of evangelical Protestantism gives it energy, but can lead to mistaking emotional responses for faith, and so on.