Thursday, March 2, 2006 | by nathan

I Shudder.

Here’s how I woke up this morning:

Brian: Sweetie, your car has a flat. 

Me: Fuck.

So, as a result of my new flat, which I think was God’s way of saying that a year and a half is as long as one can go with the conscious knowledge that one needs to replace the tires on his old car. So I emailed my editor and said I would be working at home and would email him my articles later in the day, which I have just finished doing.

At lunch Brian came home and slapped the spare on my car, and we drove it to the Hibdon’s in Edmond, which is close to where he works. I followed him in his car, then took him back to work, and drove myself to Panera Bread, which is where I am now, and where one of my top-four least favorite places in the world is driving me nuts.

I absolutely hate Edmond, Oklahoma. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a nice-looking town, lots to do, plenty of neat places to go. But also, it’s a town full of assholes. This is the only way I know how to describe it. It seems that everyone either drives an SUV or a luxury car - many drive luxury SUVs - and they all seem to attend megachurches, of which there are several just in this one town. There are W stickers everywhere you turn. People drive very rudely, and act generally stuck-up.

(Incidentally, my four least favorite places in the world are, in no particular order: Edmond, Oklahoma; Brindisi, Italy; Houston, Texas, and Hartford, Connecticut). 

I’m probably imagining a great deal of this. After all, I have friends who live now or have lived in Edmond, and I enjoy their company very much. But the feeling of the town - it honestly freaks me out a little bit. I just feel assaulted when I am here, the same way I feel assaulted if I watch Pat Robertson or Donald Rumsfeld. I feel scolded for being an artist, for being different, for not conforming or fitting in at all. I’ve always been pretty uncomfortable around rich people.

When I was a kid, the neighborhood where my parents had built their house, the house I grew up in, became suddenly the place where a lot of the rich people in town wanted to live, and so I grew up living around all of these people with what seemed to be obscene amounts of money. I got driven to school almost every morning in a Porsche that belonged to my neighbor, whose daughter was my age, who also had a kind of mini-Porsche of her own. Their family - a lot of the families around us - seemed to find us mildly entertaining for having less than them, like they had all joined some charity called "Let a normal middle-class family live here." We never really wanted for anything, my family, but we never had luxury, really. Our house was normal-sized, our vacations were to Colorado to camp, rather than to Europe on cruises. It’s just how we were, and I love the way I grew up.

Still, rich people tend to make me a little nervous. I am certain that this is mostly my own insecurity, but as I have grown older I have also noticed a kind of blindness on the part of people for whom money is not really an issue. Once, when I was living abroad, some very kind girls I was living with invited me to fly with them to Norway for the weekend to go skiing. "It’s only $1000 for the whole weekend!" they exclaimed excitedly, as if this was but a drop in the bucket. I was living on $350 a month that my parents sent me on top of paying my tuition and housing, and I would be lying if I said that in my insecurity, that I didn’t resent those girls a little.

Just a little. Hardly worth mentioning.

Granted, I am terrible with money, which is why I almost never have any. My brother and sister are the accountants in the family.

I’m on a tangent here. Suffice it to say, Edmond makes me uncomfortable because everywhere you look there is opulence and finery, and because every house seems to look like every other house, every luxury car like every other luxury car, every soccer mom like every other soccer mom. I have to constantly pray to remember that these people are just as beloved by God as I am. It doesn’t help when my new brightly-colored shoes, which have already broken in quite a lot, thank you, attract loathsome stares when I walk into places like this Panera Bread.

I do not want to judge an entire group of people whom I do not know, but I really, really hate this town. I can’t wait for the tire shop to call and tell me my car is done so that I can get home, where I am safe.

I am absolutely certain there is a lesson in all this. We’re still a work in progress here, people.

On the drive up here I was driving behind Brian, who was piloting my poor car, Calvin, on its crazy-looking spare tire, which seemed to flash at me like the ugly facial tic of a serial killer. I was praying like crazy that we get to the tire shop safely, and then it occurred to me that I should start thanking God for all the good things in my life. I felt a little like Tammy Faye Bakker, but I could think of no other way to pray for the safety of me, the man I love, and the piece-of-shit car I am crazy about, so I started giving thanks for specific things: a man who loves me and knows tons about cars, the rain that is probably going to come tonight and help put out these crazy wildfires, the warmer weather, my shoes, the sky. And we got to the tire shop safely.

So maybe I should do that now, and pray in the meantime for a Spirit of reconciliation, because I feel that a lot of what I loathe in these Edmond people is a lot of what I loathe, or don’t know the place of, in myself, my own life: a lifestyle that is relatively comfortable and the tendency to take that for granted, the fortune to be born middle-class and American, a deep fear of the ones that this world counts as nothing, the ones that Jesus is all about taking care of the most.

Okay, the tire’s ready. Gonna sign off here and drive out of this loathsome town on a set of tires that I am incredibly, incredibly fortunate to have. 

This I Believe, Oklahoma, Living In America