Jan 11th 2014: Boy Wanted

This episode of the vinyl cafe begins, like most picture dictionaries, with apples.  Stuart starts off telling us about a chapter that didn't make it into his book about small towns.  Now I've never read the book, but from the podcast a lot of the things I've noticed about small towns seems to be confirmed.  People who grow up in the city share a community with other people who have grown up in the same city, they're all from the same place, and thus share common experiences, the counter side to this isn't that people from small towns have less people in their community, it's that people from small towns in general have as much in common as people from the same city.  This is a theory I'd like to develop more, but for now Stewart McLean has added confirmation to the similarities between small towns, they usually have a theme, frequently food-based.  Beeton has honey, Alliston has potatoes, Wellesley has apple-butter, and the town in the story, Williamsburg has Mcintosh apples, and if I know small towns, at some point in the year, they have a festival dedicated to the apple, where the same carnival travels through that travels to all the other festivals in small towns.

I think my favourite part of this episode was the listener story.  It's about a guy who goes to help his mom and sister with an injured animal, that ends up being an empty paint can.  In addition to the humour of the story, I liked that the listener identified that his story was similar to a Dave and Morley story.  This reminded me of something said in the last post, about the characters being designed to make people think of other people they know.  Maybe this is related to the what I wrote about earlier about feeling a connection to other small-town folk, even from other towns, maybe people just are all pretty much the same.

As for the Dave and Morley story this week, this one was about their son Sam, and like the last episode, this one takes place in a grocery store.  A coming of age story about working in a grocery store.  In the story Sam revels in the feeling of grown-up-ness he gets from the responsibility of opening up the store he works at when his boss is away.  While like other Dave and Morley-style stories the attraction is from the universality, every kid feels this way at some point. This universal theme though got me thinking about the feeling I get as an adult the "playing house" feeling, where you feel like you're just a kid pretending to be an adult.  I wonder when this feeling goes away, or if everyone is just pretending.