I remember small-town manners, a waving man on Walnut Street, an unexpected phone call from William F. Buckley Jr., and a postal route that felt like a wilderness expedition; these scenes thread together into short recollections about community, courtesy, chance encounters, and the odd jobs that shape a life.
I lived in big cities for much of my life—New York, Tokyo, Chicago—and they have a particular rhythm: people in motion and always protective of their privacy. Small towns move at a different pace, where recognition and a nod can carry weight and set a tone for everyday behavior. That difference became obvious the moment I rolled into Tamaroa and found Clarence Chapman waving from his lawn chair at the north end of Walnut Street.
Clarence, forced out of farming and foundry work, decided to stand in front of his shed and wave at everyone passing by, cars, trucks, tractors, bikes, and pedestrians alike. ”We just decided,” said Clarence, often joined by his son Sam, ”that the world had maybe forgotten how to be friendly-like, locked up in their air-conditioned cars and basements and all.” His wave was simple but purposeful, a small insistence that people notice one another again.
Waving spread faster than anyone expected. Drivers and walkers would almost always wave back, and those who stopped wound up trading short stories and laughter on the sidewalk. A few people gestured rudely or ignored the wave, and the Chapmans smiled right through it, chalking some behavior up to city habits and letting it go. The effect was modest but genuine: friendliness became a contagious practice across a stretch of Walnut Street.
City life, by contrast, taught caution. At my first Manhattan party the apartment had steel bars on the window, not because the host was captive but because rents were high and intrusion a real worry. That practical distrust changes how people move through public space and how often they exchange simple courtesies. Small-town norms, like eye contact and a greeting, survive there because everyone expects their neighbor to recognize and return those signals.
Years later, as a national correspondent, I took note when such local customs flared back into view in surprising ways. The Chapmans’ waving reminded me that rituals of common courtesy are choices communities make, not inevitable social rules. In small towns those choices often stick, enforced not by officials but by the fact that you will see the same faces again and again.
Another memory that landed in my lap with no warning came from an unexpected phone call. While heading up a bureau in Tokyo, I picked up the phone one Sunday and heard an aristocratic voice say, “This is Bill Buckley. How are you, sir?” I was stunned; the man who founded a powerful conservative voice in America, who I had watched on television for years, was inviting me to dinner at his hotel that evening.
Buckley was traveling through Japan and, though it was last-minute, asked if I might join him and later read an article he planned to submit to a magazine. I accepted right away and found him at dinner to be warm, curious about Japan, and attentive in conversation. He asked me to read a piece that began as a red-eye account and turned quietly moving when his political opposite, Hubert H. Humphrey, appeared in the cabin as an ironically comforting presence.
In the story Buckley described standing on a plane seat to peer into a faulty projector when Humphrey intervened, then accompanied Buckley into the cockpit where London’s lights glimmered through clouds. The narrative folded politics into something human, with Humphrey’s exuberant appreciation of the landing contrasted against his own deteriorating health. Later, Buckley told me an editor rejected the piece, perhaps because it blurred the tidy categories readers expected.
Rural life also has its practical extremes, and I spent an early morning riding along with a mail carrier who turned a 120-mile round trip into a daily routine. Virgil Lane started work at 4:00 a.m., picked up the first batch of mail 25 miles out by 5:00, and navigated a single-lane dirt road that skirts Glacier National Park. He carried a snowmobile in back for winter and remembered days when snow could pile to seven feet and moose and elk would lie down across the cleared path.
His route stopped at mailboxes with names like Merle Hulford, Lloyd McCrorey, and Clarence Rose, and sometimes the road felt as busy as a commuter tunnel in summer with two or three cars passing. One day it took him three hours to go nine miles, a reminder that distance in those parts is measured differently than it is in town. At the end of a long day he discovered he had forgotten to mail his son’s letter, a small human slip after a routine of extraordinary effort.
These vignettes — the waving man on Walnut Street, a late-night dinner with a conservative icon, and a postal run through mountain snow — hang together because they are about how people show up for one another. They show how manners, chance conversations, and stubborn daily work create the texture of places we pass through or call home. They are small scenes, but they add up to the way communities behave and how memory stitches those behaviors into meaning.
Add comment