Laramie
Laramie has a strangely polished urban feel. A Wyoming town surrounded on all sides by nearly endless grassland, it feels more like a sleek New England coastal town minus the coast. Down the main street well manicured boutiques and restaurants draw gentle crowds of townsfolk and tourists inside. There is an event of some sort in the town that brought out several well built lemonade stands with professional signage. On various street corners, vertical troughs grow fresh herbs and food, possibly for free for the community.
My father had joined me for the weekend drive, hoping to finally see Idaho for the first time in his life. We walked through the town together silently mulling over this town’s strangeness. We had a casual conversation and tour of an Order of Elks lodge. The young woman guiding us said she was club manager, her sister was Exalted Leader. The first female Exalted Leader in the lodge’s history. Her picture hung on the wall at the bottom of a stairwell of black-and-white men.
The restaurant we had lunch in boasted farm to table ingredients and interesting combinations of flavors. A local grocery store sold “de-stressing collagen powder for kids.” We walked into a second story local bookstore with a selection of books that could have sat on the front tables in the Strand in Manhattan. “How is this liberal town in conservative Wyoming?” we asked aloud.
Behind the bookstore counter Judy Hibberd rang up a customer. She warmed up into a conversation initially about how she found her way back to Laramie to be with her greatgrandkids. She had a cadence to her speech that I recognized. Like the women who live in my apartment building in Greenwich Village, the ones who have lived there for 30+ years and will probably live there after I leave. I asked her about respect and dignity to start.
“I respect people who are open minded, people who are accepting of other’s differences, people who realize we are all one. I grew up just outside of Philadelphia so I have a lot of Quakers in my background. That might be some of the reason behind my view of this. But that’s how you earn respect. It’s hard for me to respect, for example, this president, because he is so openly hostile to different people or to ideas that don’t match his.”
She stewed for a moment on dignity. When I offered another angle, what has to be taken for a person to lose dignity, she was more puzzled. Instead she answered the original question, what gives a person dignity.
“I think dignity comes from a certain kind of intelligence. Not education, I’m not talking about book smarts. I think it’s a bit more of the intelligence that cues you in to why compassion is necessary and why fellowship with other people is worthwhile. A respect for others perspectives. Not necessarily agreement with them but respect for them. That gives you dignity. And it recognizes the other person’s dignity too.
That and you need to be able to afford the things you have to have in life. Not luxuries, but you need to at least be able to afford the basics. This is one way people could have their dignity taken, if society doesn’t have a path for them to afford the basics of their life.”
Judy seemed to be roughing out a shape of values that were connected to a community but emphatically not bound by it. Rather the community she seemed to imagine was one that opened its arms to other different groups. I proposed a unifying value to her, that the only intolerance she accepts is intolerance of the intolerant. She agreed smilingly. I asked her then about what makes a life good. Without skipping a beat she announced,
“Family! Family most of all. And of course, friends, liking your job, and doing well in your job. And reaching out to others and being open to change. That has been key for me. I really like change. It’s exciting to me. That’s why I’ve been so comfortable moving all over the country. It’s like an adventure.
But I’d say family and then friends are the most important. Let me give you an example. I divorced my husband of 18-19 years. We had 4 kids by that time. And I’ve stayed single since then. Not necessarily by choice, I just got busy with my life. But when I decided to divorce him, I knew I had to support myself somehow. He was an alcoholic and the marriage couldn’t go on so I went to school for teaching. For women back then there wasn’t much to do but teach, or nurse, or do secretarial work. I chose to teach and when I got my degree and could finally leave I did. But that didn’t make the time any less difficult. My kids and my friends were what sustained me. They were what made my independence possible. They’re why it was possible for me to move to Laramie and be happy too. My great grandkids are here, and I have friends here. That community, all of us supporting each other and being connected makes it worth being here.”
It felt strange asking my final question about what she wants or is missing in life. The sense I got from this 86 year old woman was total contentment. I asked anyway. No sense in assuming the answer.
“There’s nothing really that I want in life. My brother in New York died recently and left me a pretty significant trust fund. My brother in Philadelphia did the same. So I have more money now than I’ve ever had. I want to use that to set up an education fund for my grandchildren and great grandchildren. So I don’t feel like I’m lacking anything tangible.
I’d like to keep my mind and my health as I get older. That’s about all I can say I want going forward.”
She paused a moment looking like she was pondering a story.
“When I was growing up, my brothers were the smart ones. I always considered myself the athlete, not the smart one. To be honest I felt dumb, especially compared to them. When I eventually went to college at 32 it was a little bit of proving to myself that I could do it too. My first class that I got an A just astounded me. I went to Cheyney University which was predominantly black and the whole experience opened my world. More than just proving to myself that I could do it, to be there, to be accepted too, just flipped my world wide open.
I went on to get 2 masters after that too. It felt like there really wasn’t anything totally out of reach. So I think from then on, I didn’t feel like I needed much else. I was more interested in seeing more, and meeting more people and living my life open to others”
I don’t often hear political ideologies crop up in these discussions. But my nagging question on this town’s liberalism turned out not far from the mark. I hadn’t heard a more clear representative of the liberal worldview anywhere yet. To find it here in Wyoming was a peculiar surprise. If Laramie is filled with people like Judy, then I suppose my question is answered.
