Small Town Christmas PTA

We live in a small town.  Well, if you can even call this a town.  Let me start over.

We live in a small community made up of other, smaller communities.  Unless you are from a similar place in the Universe, you probably couldn't appreciate all the little nuances that make life here so interesting.

My son's school, for instance, is not named for one town or even one community. It's a hyphenated name for the two communities that make up this quaint little zone in the Northwest corner of Greenville County.

Created in days-gone-by, a different era when manufacturing was the life and breath of a town, Slater-Marietta still sits, a strange sense of pride imbued in every empty storefront building or run down tire shop.  Only the businesses that are essential to every day life remain.  A small grocery, a gas station or two, Slater Drug store where you can still get a milk shake or a float any day of the week as long as you don't mind waiting for Bea, the older lady behind the counter, to methodically mix it up for you.  There's a barbershop, a tiny post office that only opens after 12:00 every day, and the aforementioned elementary school.

Most people in this community work outside this community.  There is a dearth of jobs where once this place stood as a bustling, booming part of the Southern economy.  The old mill, which still operates but requires far less manpower than in the distant past, puts out the smell of burned carpet once in a while, and atop the big hill above it, from Slater Hall, you can look down upon its roof, flat and expansive, almost like a piece of ground.  Beyond it lies Beachwood Farms--it goes back as far in my mind as I can remember.  In the summer Beachwood employs a large population of migrant workers and a few locals.  In the winter, it sits brown and barren, lonely with its market locked up tight until spring.

This place possesses a history so rich one could talk about it for days. So many amazing stories exist, locked away in the minds of the elders who grew up here, worked in the mill or owned shops in the small downtown area where now we boast two traffic lights.  The richness of the land around me is breathtaking on a winter morning when you can see clear to Ceasar's Head from the crooked highway I traverse each day.  In the Summer, fields planted with tomatoes or corn, sunflowers or okra glimmer in the morning sunlight as the plants stretch themselves toward the sky.  Deer frequently cross our paths, so much so that we drive more cautiously around these steep sharp curves than we used to.

We see our share of the odd and unbelievable too. One morning a summer or two ago, I met a big blue-headed peacock prancing up the yellow line in the road as if he owned it.  He dragged his big long tail feathers behind him, and stopped to stare at me as I stopped my car to stare at him. A standoff, of sorts, we looked one another up and down before we both decided to continue on in the directions we had started.  No one knows how he got there or from whence he came.  We never figured out if he got rescued or barbequed we just noticed his absence in the middle of our road on the way back home later that day.

Odd and unbelievable describes many things about living in a small community/town/hyphenated area.  The people most of all.

Tonight my son had his first Christmas Chorus performance at Slater-Marietta Elementary School.  His school is small, with about 500 students total, and the number of parents who join PTA is embarrassingly scant.  In fact, they trick parents into coming to PTA meetings by having their children "perform" so mom and/or dad will feel like a heel if they miss it.  Many grandparents raise their grandchildren here--young grandparents with elementary-aged grandchildren; a lot of these folks started making families young.  Like any other place, there is variety, but like most areas of the small hometown-persuasion, you get a lot more of what can only be considered sameness.

Many people around here grew up Baptist and still proudly attend their churches.  Church gives them that sense of belonging that everyone craves, but most of all it makes them feel better;  better than the immigrants in the trailer park behind the school, better than the one "homeless" guy who walks up and down the street on occasion with a sign strapped to his back. There are two types of Baptists; the type which truly believes in the loving kindness of a heavenly Father, and the kind who seems to want everyone except themselves to go straight to hell.  I rarely meet one which fits neatly in the middle.

I'm  not knocking the churches.  In this area they do a great deal of work helping the poor and needy.  One runs a food pantry, another tries to bring in young folks who struggle to get by.  I learned as a little girl, that in times when you can barely afford to eat, Faith is the most precious thing you have.  It's often all you can afford, so at once you both possess nothing and everything.  This, I believe, is the goal of our small-town houses of worship. With denomination though, comes indoctrination.  Rules to follow get meted out to everyone, regardless of each person's own beliefs.  You could very well find yourself ruined in this town if your spiritual/religious beliefs don't line up with the popular theology of the day.  You can try to avoid religious conversation and talk of politics, but sooner or later you're going to get cornered, so you better keep a mental note of what to say in such instances to keep from giving yourself away.  Unless, of course, you hail from this small corner of the Earth, in which case your beliefs probably align quite well with those of the natives.

I often attend school functions alone.  I won't lie, I feel awkward walking in behind a couple there to watch their kid sing Christmas songs in her most beautiful Christmas dress.  I throw the seating off wherever I sit because of the chairs, arranged in even numbers in rows.  Tonight I walked in behind one such couple and apparently spied the same row of seats at about the same moment.  It probably seemed to them that I followed them to their seat.  They went a few chairs in and sat down.  That meant I had the two seats at the end of the row from which to choose.  I didn't want to leave a seat between me and the lady I walked in behind, in case someone needed the other chair I wasn't using so I sat down next to the lady and exchanged pleasantries with her, feeling the need to explain why I took the seat directly beside her.

As time went on more and more parents poured in.  The front row, already filled up when I arrived, seated an array of colorful characters.  Directly in front of me a lady who sounded like a man played with her cell phone camera and talked to her male friend, (husband?) about someone's "butt a showin' " and about mundane living sorts of things.  One lady sat alone like me, but with a giant Santa hat perched on her head.  She didn't move a muscle the whole time, not even to crack a smile.  At one point I wanted to poke her but alas, I sat too far away and couldn't reach her.

Not long after I sat down next to the lady who walked in ahead of me, I noticed her flowery perfume.  Not a bad smell, just a wee bit strong.  I listened to her husband telling her what the gym looked like when this was his school, listened as he reminisced about old times at SME.  As the crowd grew a couple I never actually saw slid in behind me.  I immediately was overwhelmed by the smell of Polo cologne.  I hadn't whiffed that scent since high school, when my super crush of a lifetime boy wore it all the time. They say smells can conjure up memories more potently than anything.  I get that feeling of nostalgia every year when we bring in our Christmas tree.  The smell of Polo, however, did not evoke such warm feelings or memories, especially since it was most likely applied to the guy's skin via fire-truck hose.  The smell attacked my senses, made my eyes water and my stomach lurch.

Turns out the guy wearing the Polo behaved as obnoxiously as his cologne smelled.  He kept talking so loudly no one around him could hear the play.  He felt the need to announce when a kindergarten girl scratched her rear during a song.  I listened to him critique the weight and apparel of every teacher, complain about the principal, make fun of one kid's teeth.  He was a real winner.

Just as I started to get acclimated to the blending scents around me a young mother came rushing in and asked if the seat next to me was taken.  Feeling a sort of kinship with her, I happily offered her the seat and engaged in a bit of small talk with her before she pulled out her phone and got lost in it.  As she sat down I noticed another strange smell wafting over me, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

Suddenly, and from out of nowhere, the young mom said, "I smell like fried potatoes and onions."

I just looked at her and smiled sympathetically.  That was it---Potatoes and onions.

"Yeah," she went on, "Right before we came over here I was cooking potatoes and curling my daughter's hair and chasing my one year old around."

"Mom life." I commiserated with her.

"Yeah, my husband picked the wrong day to work overtime.  I really couldda used him tonight!"

"Yeah, that's how it seems to go." I said, realizing our kinship had limits.

The principal walked by swiftly and approached the stage where my boy and his choir-mates were hiding out until performance time.  Principal stuck his head between the curtains and said something, then turned around and walked back through the crowd, red faced.  He looked down at the young mom beside me and said, "Y'all couldn't hear what I just said could you?"

"No," She answered. "We didn't hear a thing."

She looked at me side-wise and I said, "Must have been something really bad he said, or his face wouldn't be so red!"

"Yeah," she agreed..  "Like, 'Are y'all not fuckin' ready yet?'"

"Uh, yeah...right." I mumbled back.  Only in Marietta, I thought to myself.

When her little girl came out, a first grader, round cheeked and curly haired, the young mom beamed with pride.  "That's my little girl right there, second from the right," she told me, expecting me to look and comment.

"She's adorable." I said earnestly. "I love her pretty Christmas dress."

"Thanks," said the little girl's mother.  And that ended our few moments of motherly kinship.

As I sat through  the Kindergarteners, then First Graders renditions of Christmas classics, I noticed my eyes burning, nose running, stomach churning more and more.  Added to the smells of cologne, perfume and fried potatoes, the smell of stale cigarettes suddenly came over me.  It wafted my direction from I know not where, but I found myself imagining my own embarrassment should I end up fleeing my seat near the front for the ladies room, trying to hold in a mouth-full of vomit until I reached the toilet.  Because you know that never works.  You just can't hold vomit in like that.  Falling back on my healthcare days, I forced myself to mouth-breathe for the next 25 minutes.  It helped, unless I momentarily lapsed and forgot to keep my mouth open.  If even one nostril caught a whiff of the offensive olfactory onslaught, I knew I'd be doomed.

Somehow though, I made it through to the end.  I got to see my kid trying to hide behind another kid while he sang "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" and "Fa la la la la" and some other songs about Santa and an elf named Elfis.  It dawned on me as I sat through each grade level's performances that these kinds of things bore the hell out of me; but I wouldn't miss them for the world.  Let's face it, we don't show up at these events to see everyone's kids sing together.  We show up to watch OUR kids get on stage and perform.  We internally critique them, analyze their behaviors because we KNOW them. Do you think for a minute Charlie hiding behind another kid surprised me?  No way.  It's classic Charlie, which is also why watching him do it became the highlight of my evening.

Once the performance was over, Principal asked us all for another round of applause.  In any other school, those kids might have gotten a standing ovation.  When my girls went to bigger city schools where rich parents loaded the PTA fund with money for Fall Festivals and special Christmas treats, standing ovations at every PTA performance were standard.  Not in Slater-Marietta.  Parents in Slater-Marietta know that life isn't easy.  They aren't the kind to award a trophy to every child, and they aren't going to stand up to clap for a bunch of younguns flubbing their way through "Jingle Bells" or "Santa Claus is Coming to Town."  You want a standing ovation around here, you better do something outstanding--like join the military at a mere 10 years old or bag your first deer before your 12th birthday.  Extra points if you're a girl and you do those things.

Principal set us free to go retrieve our children from their respective teachers.  I found my boy on the stage with his peers, wearing elf hats and laughing at jokes only fifth graders would find funny.  I spoke to his teacher--thanked her for her hard work, and went back to find my kid. I found him talking to a friend and could barely drag him away despite his growling tummy and my overwhelming fatigue.

On the way to our car I overheard at least three different parents cursing at their kids.  "Git in the damn car." One said.

"Where's your damn jacket?" said the other.

"Let's go," one dad said at regular dad volume. "I can't take anymore of this bullshit tonight. Git in the damn car and don't forget your damn coat this time."

From young nose-pierced moms who show up smelling like potatoes and use words like "fuck" in everyday conversation with strangers to moms who come dressed like they're going to Sunday meeting, doused with enough perfume to cause anaphylaxis , dads who don't know when to shut up, and uncles who dive into a tub of Polo before coming to the PTA meeting, we all shared something in common.

None of us really wanted to be there.  Parents are tired people.  We see our kids daily, we hear their silly jokes and stores about their days.  We feed them and bathe them, clothe them and make sure the homework gets done.  If we get lucky, we might find a few hours a week to just enjoy them.  We show up to watch our kids pick their noses and scratch their butts in front of all our friends and neighbors because it's the right thing to do.  We show up because we love our young ones, and want them to see the pride in our faces when they look out and find us in the audience.  "That's my kid right there," we say,  as if we think some other parent will like our kid better than they like their own.

I don't judge them.  Or at least, not the lady who smelled of potatoes.  She was just trying to do life, y'all.  The people who showered in smelly stuff that came from a bottle--them I judge--because I don't care who you are or what hyphenated community you live in, there ain't no sense in smelling up a place like that.  Your kid doesn't care if you smell like au du gardenia, and the person sitting next to you would probably prefer you not smell like anything at all.  Heck, sweat would be better.

Next PTA meeting when they ask everyone to shut off their cell phones I'm going to stand up.  I'm going to stand up and say, "If you are sitting beside someone who is wearing too much perfume or cologne, please take this opportunity to change your seat."

It might just save some poor parent from an embarrassing puke moment in front of the whole PTA.


I guess I'll end this little story with the only phrase that pops into my head  at the moment:

Try not to have a Smelly Christmas.

Wishing you a perfume-free New Year!