Back Story: Not a native

“Not a native,” “not a local,” “not a townie.” It’s all the same thing. I noticed it a dozen years ago when I first joined the Yellow Springs Community Band. There were people who had grown up together and those who had not. You could tell who was native, by the way they looked at each other, anticipated each other’s moves, finished each other’s sentences. Once a native; always a native. Not born here, you’ll never qualify.

I grew up on Long Island and married a girl (my first wife) from a tiny town in Massachusetts up near the border with New Hampshire. The headline for the nuptials in the local paper read, “Native marries islander.” Later we would summer in Cape Porpoise on the coast of southern Maine in a cottage her grandfather built when he was only 20 years old. Her uncle had married a local girl and raised his family there. My wife’s family, with more than a century’s worth of ties to the community, was considered to be “summer people.” That was one category higher than “tourist.”

Her folks were fond of a story that was passed from generation to generation about a conversation overheard on a porch in Cape Porpoise. Two elderly women, natives, were talking about a man who had been born about in the very next hamlet and moved with his family across the line to Cape Porpoise when he was an infant. He lived in the Cape all his life, married a local girl and raised his family there. At the time they were talking about him, he was also quite elderly.

“He’s not a native,” one of them said. “He was born in the Wildes District.”

“No, he’s not,” the other one agreed.

Not a native of Yellow Springs? Not to worry, this village is a bit less provincial than Cape Porpoise, Maine. In fact, thanks to Antioch College, it’s downright cosmopolitan. Many of those townies I ran across in the Community Band were born here as children of faculty. So while they are natives, their parents most likely were not.

One of those pearls that float around town, “more copies per capita of the New York Times are sold in Yellow Springs than in New York,” while probably not true, points out something I noticed that isn’t talked about very much: There are a heck of a lot of transplanted New Yorkers here. I can’t say we seek each other out. We don’t wear it like a badge on our sleeve; neither do we try to hide it. It just takes a while to discover our commonality when we first meet each other. I always expected to run into other New Yorkers in my travels around the country, but not in Ohio. However, as Antioch Midwest President Michael Fishbein often laments, you can’t get a good bagel around here.

Always eager to improve upon the diversity of the village, the townies have always been accepting of new arrivals, no matter where they hail from, even New York. When I would tell them about my whimsical move here to get out of the rat race and spend more time on my writing, they would never fail to congratulate me on my choice. Back in New York they would have said, “Are you out of your freakin’ mind?”

So here I am, not a native with no chance of ever becoming one, no matter how long I stay. But, this is no cause for concern. We all seem to find a way to carve out a niche for ourselves in village life, whether we were born here or not. At least we’re not tourists.