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Date Posted: 22:22:20 06/13/03 Fri
Author: Rev Joe
Subject: Re: rural vs city
In reply to: june 's message, "rural vs city" on 05:54:26 06/13/03 Fri

I've always observed that one person's Heaven is another person's Hell. This was driven home this week when I visited my friend's Avacado ranch. He's a gentleman farmer, who lives in the suburbs of the "Big City" and only visits the ranch to sign checks and make sure the caretaker is taking care. In his house at the ranch were pictures of women that were not his wife (who hates the ranch and won't come out there - it's too far from the mall). These were his old girlfriends from the early seventies when he first bought the ranch. Each one was a potential wife, and each one broke it off when they tried living at the ranch. The general complaint was, "It's too damn quiet!"

He wistfully spoke of the eighteen months he lived alone at the ranch, without TV, as the happiest he ever was in his life. Now, at the young age of 56, he is quite ill and doesn't know how much longer he's got on this earth. So he's fixing up the ranch house to be more comfortable and planning on spending as much time out there as he can - his shopaholic wife be damned!

I guess everybody has to find out what and where makes them happy, and dig in. When other people are involved, compromises have to be ironed out of course. As they say: Compromises are like dental appointments - you're damned if you make them, and damned if you don't. Some people would not live anywhere but New York City, while others would be quite happy if they never even visited the place.

I will say something for the small, rural communities: Last Fall I was on a canoe trip in Vermont - a rural state if ever there were one - and in one of the small villages I passed through the local church was having a pig roast and auction to raise money to help a young couple who just had a mentally and physically handicapped baby and were facing enormous hospital bills. The whole community came out and pitched in, and some of the people even bid on the items they had donated to the auction, just to make sure everything sold and the parents got as much money as the people could scrape together. All I could think of was, "Man, that would never happen in Los Angeles." Here, we never meet our neighbors unless there is an earthquake, and that's usually only to fight over whether to rebuild the fence out of brick or wood.

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