BRATTLEBORO — To say that my parents are a little right-leaning is like saying that the ocean is a little damp.
Don't get me wrong: I have no problem with their views as long as those views remain in their chosen home of Virginia and don't come up to Brattleboro like a pair of jackbooted thugs, kicking in the door and demanding papers... and... (breathe, breathe, serenity now...)
Just joking. Honestly, if you knew my mother and could imagine her wearing jackboots, you'd chuckle. But the point remains that I am (by a long shot) the most left-leaning of my family.
That isn't to say that I'm a true liberal, per se - just a liberal by comparison. Both of my brothers went to military academies (Virginia Military Institute and West Point) and even my very sweet sister thought Bush did a pretty fair job.
The irony is that, when my parents came up to visit last year during the Strolling of the Heifers, they had been a little hesitant about coming into a town full of tree-huggers, granola-eaters, hippies, or (fill in your label here).
The day of the parade, we trundled downtown and stood on the sidewalk to watch the parade: the cows, the floats, the strange dancers, Alfred in a dress, and all.
The look on my father's face totally threw me. There was no stern disapproval or nervous smirking, but a look of true delight.
“Are you having fun, Pop?” I asked.
He smiled and said, “It's like Main Street America in the 1950s.”
And it is (in some ways). There is a pervasive sense of decency that seems to inform the way people treat each other here that I think would be refreshing to anyone who has been living in what has become the “New American Traditional” lifestyle - box stores, subdivisions, strip malls, and lonely American flags flying over double-wide trailers/churches.
What a surprise it was to my parents that their black- (or at least gray-) sheep son had found a home that they recognized - not from their vision of hippie, free-love abandon, but from their own childhoods.
What a surprise it was for me to see my own feelings for this little town reflected in their eyes.