Wild Onion Saturday at Town Commons
You may sense a trend in the last post and this one: just like underwear, when you ain't got time, just recycle.
The following is one of my columns for The Independent, a newspaper edited and published by my good friend Matt Jones, now Matt Duffy (but that's a whole post in itself), in the Emerald City of Greenville, North Carolina.
What amazes me is that I am reliving what I wrote a decade ago.
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Originally published in the 07 March 1994 edition of The Independent
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Last Saturday, we took a frisbee, a blanket, and the dog down to the Town Commons and laid our heads in the sprouting wild onions while looking at the swollen Mighty Tar River.
As the Town Commons comes alive again with activity — kites, bikes, RayBanned sun bathers, and dogs — I think of the people who once lived here on the river bank.
Until the early ’60s, the plot of sloped land was home to 500 impoverished Greenvillians. Accounts of the neighborhood identify the cry of squalor: crumbling tenements, inadequate plumping, crime, and drugs. As was the case in thousands of cities in 1960s America, the white knight of Urban Renewal charged in with bulldozers and dump trucks, displacing the 500 black residents of what was called “Ripple City.”
The landscaping and the addition of an amphitheatre hid any remnants of the slums. And to further the romantic notion of the Old South — a twisted romance — the white knight of Urban Renewal placed Confederate canons in the heart of old Ripple City where the blues once cried.
Why such a melancholy retrospective amidst this glorious spring Saturday of winging plastic discs, sunning skin, and highflying kites? I thought that Hampton boy always writes funny stuff, you say.
Laying on this monument of Progress and Beautification, I watch the people who frequent Town Commons. Most are from Generation X, or post baby boomers, or the pejorative baby busters, or 13th Gen, or coin your own term and write a book about it. I am talking ’bout my generation, people born after 1960.
Unlike our parents, GenXers weren’t apportioned the same American dream of buying into ever-expanding consumerism. The sweet, all-perks jobs ain’t there, along with the subdivided placidity of manicured front yards and two-car garages. For the first generation since the turn of the century, this generation can’t claim “I got it better than Mama and Deddee.”
Greenville is a haven for GenXers. Look at the demographics. With a population of 50,000, this town has 14,224 people of ages 19 to 34, according to the 1990 Census statistics. There are several reasons for Greenville’s claim to being a GenX refuge. First, it is, although the old money still refuses to believe it, a college town. College students enthralled with Town Commons and the happennin’ scene tend to stick around. Some 4,791 residents aged 22 to 24 — the largest subgroup in the largest chunk.
This propensity to stay around, or as some say "linger like a bad stench," stems from an inability to deal with the real world. Newly graduated with degrees in Industrial Hygiene, some kids have difficulty finding that 28K job. Still other college graduates dive head first into the real world and find it’s full of shit.
I am in this latter category. To borrow a few terms from Douglas Coupland, I had a job in a Sick Office with no windows, buzzing lights, and bad ventilation. There I sat in my Lamb-Slaughtering Stall — a partitioned cubicle with an ancient computer, a smiley-faced sticker saying “Have a Nice Day,” and a coffee mug imprinted with “Tim.”
After two years of perpetual and chronic abhorrence of the Sick Office, I, like many other Xers, left the signed-in-triplicate, 8-to-5 lifestyle in search of something else. For many of us, that something else is mystifying.
Time for some more demographics: of the 14,000 Greenvillians aged 18 to 34, 10,221 live in poverty. This is an ideal town to live in poverty. With a low standard of living, a median rent of $374, and the state’s lowest draft beer prices (I have researched the latter extensively), Greenville is a town in which GenXers can get by. Moreover, the profusion of service-oriented jobs allows for a perpetuation of minimum-waged part-timers; the retail trade alone has 5,000 jobs.
Greenville GenXers are, on the whole, displaced people living as inexpensively as we can. We find solace from the legions of our peers living here and share in the balloon-head creed In Limbo We Float. We no longer laugh at the veterans who say: “We live in a Pitt.” (Note: Greenville is in Pitt County).
After a big week of working 20 hours, paying the utilities on the very last possible day, and restocking the cupboard with macaroni and cheese, GenXers come together to regale in the sunshine on Town Commons. This is the city park that Mama and Deedee made for us, just as their Mamas and Deedees made for them, by forcing marginalized people to move.
But not in their wildest dreams did they think we would become displaced ourselves. Sometimes, on sun-filled Saturdays, when I lay my head deep in the wild onions on the Commons, I feel the cry of the blues.
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