Just Visiting This Planet

When we lived in Atlanta during the early 80s, there was a popular, mostly harmless, nativist fad going around. Georgia, Florida, and much of the Southeast's population was growing so fast that a certain cultural divide developed between the real Southerners and the suburban newcomers from the East and Midwest. In some places, the Damn Yankees (who stayed, as opposed to the plain old Yankees, who went back where they came from) became the majority, and South Floridians, for example, felt a bit crowded. One of the ways they found to distinguish themselves was the ubiquitous, conspicuous medium of bumper stickers.

That was possibly the heyday of the bumper sticker, and one of the best designs showed a green and blue map of Florida emblazoned with one bright orange word: NATIVE. Without getting into complex sociological analysis, I had to respect the pride and rootedness expressed in that simple graphic statement. Read any of Carl Hiaasen's novels, and you get a street-level feeling for the inhabitants of Florida before it was "developed" - that is, paved, subdivided, reclaimed from swamps, and packaged as just so much valuable real estate. This mixture of nostalgia, rage, and insider-knowledge could easily be read as a chauvinistic, xenophobic rant, but as an outsider myself I felt a touch of envy.

There followed, of course, a rash of imitators: a blue and green map of Georgia with a bright peach-colored NATIVE, which was too close to the original; the more aggressive and blustery DON'T MESS WITH TEXAS with the inevitable lone star emblem; and the more relaxed and musical CAROLINA ON MY MIND. Further back in time, there was the classic I (heart) NY and its Southern cousin VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS (also with a heart), both of which beckoned tourists to "Come and see us, and bring your credit card," whereas the NATIVE motif seemed to suggest "Thanks for coming, now go away."

The envy I felt was probably typical of us migrants who have fled the heartland looking for greener pastures. Although I was reportedly born there, I have no memory of living in Minnesota, having moved across the river to Wisconsin when I was three. If the Vikings are playing the Cowboys, you know I'm pulling for the Purple Gang, and I can dig the self-deprecating humor of A Prairie Home Companion, but I don't feel like I'm really from there. We spent six of my formative years in Wisconsin, where I made some strong loyalties to the Braves, the Packers, and the Badgers. You can tell how long ago that was (late 50s), because the Braves were still in Milwaukee, and Hank Aaron was my hero.

But we were ostensibly movin' on up, and my family's next stop was Michigan, first a six-year sojourn on the west side of Detroit, then three years of high school in the more affluent northern suburbs. It was only natural while growing up in the Motor City to become a fan of the Tigers, Lions, and Pistons, and as college became a consideration, to form an attachment to either the maize and blue or the Spartans. I admit that there is something deeply stirring about standing with 100,001 excited people in Michigan Stadium to sing "Hail to the Victors." (Can you say Nuremburg Rally?) Yet compared to my Birmingham friends, I had little connection to, or history with, Michigan.

You make choices, and when most of my friends went to Ann Arbor, East Lansing, or Ypsilanti, I went to Kent, and yes, Mr. Frost, it has made all the difference. It was a little strange not knowing the local color that was second-nature to the kids from Cleveland, Akron, Canton, and Youngstown. So I read Camus and Hesse and learned to live with it. The serious wandering took me to the Upper Peninsula, north Georgia, Chicago, upstate New York, Oberlin, North Carolina, and back to Atlanta, which is where we came in five paragraphs ago. Going someplace different had clearly become a habit, but not one Gven and I fancied as we started a family. Little Jessi and Helga were born in Atlanta, and our migratory pace slowed down.

That was the era of the aforementioned bumper stickers. Some other notable examples were QUESTION AUTHORITY, which spawned QUESTION REALITY, and my personal favorite, JUST VISITING THIS PLANET. The very opposite of the nativist declaration of rootedness, this one spoke to me, the perpetual migrant worker on the postmodern transplantation.

As if this isn't already more information than anyone needs, our little family has flourished in foreign soil. We left Atlanta when Jessi and Helga were around the age at which I left Minnesota, and they have grown up in Ohio. I think they can say they are from here. Then it's up to them how far they are blown by the four winds, how widely they scatter their seeds, and where eventually they put down roots.