Knock knock. Hoosier?

Megan over at By and By posted a few days ago about Midwestern Literature, and does it even exist as a genre, and what defines it, exactly?

And are people from other regions of the U.S. as shaped by their region as southerners are by theirs? I believe Midwesterners are, although I would say that we don’t proclaim our identity as much as Southerners do, perhaps because we’ve not been asked to justify that identity as much as Southerners have been over the years. The Midwest isn’t considered majestic, or gothic, or rebellious, or bigoted, or inbred, particularly, it’s just considered boring. And in a way, it is, and I’m not just talking about the scenery. True, the people in Minnesota are very different from the people in Indiana (or god forbid, Kansas), but we also do share a kind of regional identity. If you’ve even listened to Garrison Keillor on a Prairie Home Companion you might have some idea what I’m talking about.

I’ve noticed that Southerners are pretty picky about who’s pretending to be a Southerner in the movies. For instance, many southerners quite rightly protested DeNiro’s villain in Cape Fear, mostly because he sounded like he was being played by Foghorn Leghorn. There is a big difference, they will tell you, between an Alabama southern accent and a Louisiana southern accent, and I agree, there is. Frequently though, those same Southerners, when I favor them with my world-famous imitation of my mother (who hails from south-central Nebraska), will tell me that she sounds like Marge, that cop in Fargo. My mother most certainly does not sound like Marge in Fargo, but leave it to a Southerner to not be able to hear the difference.

So all this got me thinking about those things that I consider unique about the Midwest, and why I am, when all is said and done, sort of proud to be from such a place. And I thought that I would tell you readers a story, a true story, see if that doesn’t help me get my point across.

A few years ago, before the death of my stepfather Al, a farmer who succumbed to a mysterious breathing ailment most likely related to a lifetime of handling fertilizers and other chemical poisons, my mother and I were driving down the gravel road that took us from their farm to the closest county road into town. For the better part of a mile, we drove in between the fields Al tended and the fields belonging to Al’s brother, Archie. Both had planted wheat that year.

My mom was glancing across the road toward her brother-in-law’s fields, which were now waist-high with a crop just about ready to be harvested. I didn’t think too much about it at the time, although it was unusual for my mother to take her eyes off the road, as she was very tender-hearted about the rabbits and pheasants and even the field mice that routinely met their deaths under her wheels. The road saw only about ten to fifteen cars a day, and the adjacent wildlife were, I suppose, relatively unschooled in the ways of avoiding them. Also, the groomers hadn’t hit this road in a long time, and the gravel had been pushed into deep furrows, making it a bit more difficult to navigate than usual.

Gravel roads in that part of the Nebraska are narrow, and flanked by ditches to hold the run-off rain, and it is the custom to drive in the middle of the road until a car approaches from the opposite direction. At that time, you must slow down, and cross into the lesser-used right-hand furrows, while the approaching car does the same. Also, at the point when you pass the oncoming car, it is customary to lift your fingers, and only your fingers, from the steering wheel, and give a slight nod of your head to the approaching driver. The person in the oncoming car of course does the same. If the person in the other car doesn’t know you, say perhaps because you are an infrequent visitor to your mother’s farm, they may not return the salute, but that is only part of a natural reticence in the denizens of that area towards strangers, because strangers are so infrequently seen, and you should not take it as an offense. On the other hand, if the oncoming driver doesn’t recognize you, but does recognize your car, because it belongs to your mother and their neighbor, you will be given the benefit of the doubt and, of course, the accompanying salute.

My mother and I had just passed her brother-in-law in his truck on the road between his fields and Al’s, and after she watched him disappear behind a rise in the rear view mirror, she slowly pulled over to the side of road.

“What are you doing?” I said.

Mom didn’t answer but instead put her beige 1988 Riviera into park, and got out, leaving the door open. She crossed the road gingerly in her low-heeled sandals and stepped carefully over the ditch on the opposite side. She then waded into the wheat field, and looked around, shading her eyes with one hand.

I could not for the life of me imagine what could possibly inspire my mother to abandon her vehicle and take to the fields in this way. For all I knew she had decided to fly into town instead.

She returned to the car just moments later holding a shaft of wheat in her hand. She sat down on the car seat with the door still open. She slowly pulled the wheat apart and looked at the kernels in her hand. She pushed one or two of them around with her finger.

“Mom, what ARE you doing?”

Again, she didn’t answer but instead dropped the wheat into the road, pulled her legs into the car and shut the door.

“Mom.”

She put the car into drive and eased back into the middle of the road. “Well,” she said with a kind of terse satisfaction, “I don’t know why they’re crying poor this year. That wheat looked pretty good to me.”

It’s difficult to explain to someone not from the Midwest what a quintessentially Midwestern moment it is that I just described. Perhaps I should start with the first rule of being a Midwesterner: Don’t let anyone else know what you’ve got. Midwesterners are judgmental above all else, and if they know you’re doing well, they’re going to wonder why you are being so stingy by, for example, bringing a noodle dish to every single pot luck when you could afford to bring a meat dish. And if you are not doing so well, then why were you just seen buying the expensive quilted toilet paper, when you should be buying the inexpensive Kroger brand, especially since you seem to be too good to clip grocery coupons like everyone else.

So you can’t win. The only thing you can do is deflect attention to someone else (Can you believe the Myers are putting in a swimming pool? A BUILT-IN swimming pool?), or keep them guessing as to what you’ve got. You do this by being noncommittal at all times. If someone asks you how your year is going, and you’re obviously doing well because you have a brand new car in your driveway, you say “Fine.” If someone asks you the same question, and you just had your new car repossessed, you say “Okay.”

Pride is the ultimate sin a Midwesterner can commit, and so praise is properly deflected, not accepted, except if you accept it in the name of the Lord, and even then, don’t be too showy about it. If the juiciness of a Thanksgiving turkey is praised, the proper cook always claims that last year’s turkey was better and she forgot to baste it for nearly an hour and oh, gosh, she doesn’t know where her head was at but thank you. If a shiny new piece of farm equipment is being lauded in envious terms by a neighboring farmer, the owner will be sure to point out that a hitch tends to stick in the cold and they sure don’t make things like the used to.

Pride is never measured in terms that assess its affect on you, but in terms that indicate the degree to which you are attempting to show up your neighbors. My mother, for example, is a genuinely good and gentle woman, and lord knows she is a thousand times more tolerant and open-minded than anyone else in Buffalo County, but I have never heard a statement more dripping with scorn and revulsion than when she told me that Lou Ellen had just worn her best dress to church. Her best dress. I don’t know what Lou Ellen could’ve been thinking. You just don’t do that. You wear your best dress to your daughter’s or son’s wedding. You don’t wear it to church. With all your neighbors there.

Because who do you think you are?