Last Monday, I chanced upon an e-bike lying on its side on the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. Odd, I thought. I looked around, saw no one, continued on my way.
The bike was still there that afternoon and the next morning and all the rest of the week. Stolen, then ditched? An abandoned rental?
On Friday, I called the State College police. Soon, an officer pulled up, loaded the bike in his car and hauled it away.
You’ve got to like a town where the cops can respond so quickly to such a miniscule matter.
You’ve got to love a town where a week can go by without anyone taking an item that doesn’t belong to them.
I didn’t used to love State College. When I got here 30 years ago, I thought Penn State was a jock school with all the trappings of a jock school: fraternities, loud parties, drunks staggering down the street and a lot of rah-rah nonsense. For the first 16 years I lived here, I had a front-row seat: My house in the Highlands was within a couple of blocks of 30 frat houses.
My boisterous neighbors gave me plenty to write about: home invasions, stolen porch furniture and, on the darker side, hazing deaths and sexual assaults.
All these years later, people still ask me about the Woo People – the name I bestowed on the students in my midst via the same logic ornithologists apply when assigning names like bobwhite, chickadee and whippoorwill according to the sounds those birds make.
On balance, I found State College kind of funny back then, kind of delusional and kind of dumb, for a college town. The dearth of bookstores downtown, I thought, spoke volumes (so to speak). There was Svoboda’s for new books and Webster’s for used ones. Then, from the time Svoboda’s closed in 2000 until Squirrel & Acorn arrived a couple of years ago, Webster’s was pretty much the only game in town.
Last spring, two of my oldest friends were considering moving here (they did). They wanted to know how I felt about this place where I have now lived longer than I have lived anywhere else on Earth.
In no particular order, I covered the transportation difficulties (yes, the airport’s easy if you don’t mind puddle-jumping and paying extra); the arts-and-culture scene (two thumbs up); the community’s growing diversity (two more thumbs up); the food scene (meh); the healthcare options (good on flesh wounds, best to go to the big city for the life-and-death stuff); the sporting life (Penn State women’s volleyball!);
How one feels about this place, any place, is largely a matter of attitude. I’ve known people who thought Nowheresville was a more apt name than Happy Valley and couldn’t wait to leave. I’ve also known people who thought they’d found Heaven on Earth when they moved here and can’t imagine living anywhere else.
I’ve never been solidly in either camp, but these days, I’m happy to report, I’m closer to the Heaven end of the spectrum than the Nowhere end. Part of the reason is that there has always been more to State College than meets the eye. The jock school culture was so dominant that it was hard to see what else was here, at first.
Not surprisingly, the longer you live in a town, the more like-minded people you find and, with their help, the better you get at knowing where to look for the things that feed your soul. (For the record, I like sports; what I don’t like is sports-as-religion.)
For as long as I’ve lived here, there have been poetry readings and lecture series and live music and showings of films you would not see in a commercial theater. But now there’s more of everything.
In the past year I’ve heard music at Elk Creek Café, Acoustic Brew, the State Theatre, Manny’s, 3 Dots, Webster’s, Boal City Brewing, Concerts on the Green in Lemont, Kyle Peck and Catherine Augustine’s house, Pine Grove Hall, Eisenhower Auditorium, Schwab Auditorium and Penn State’s School of Music. And that’s not counting the bars, the festivals and the places I haven’t made it to for one reason or another.
My friends and acquaintances are Lebanese, Indian, Greek, English, Swiss, German, Ukrainian, Turkish, Japanese, Chinese, Ghanaian, South African, Nigerian, Spanish, Russian, Israeli, Polish and probably a few other places I’m forgetting.
Because of its size, State College will never be as interesting as New York or Philly or Pittsburgh. But I now find it plenty interesting enough. Plus, after 30 years, I’m deeply entrenched in a community. And if an e-bike were left on the street in New York or Philly or Pittsburgh, I doubt it would still be there five days later.
That counts for something.
All of which is to say, on this week of Thanksgiving, that I am grateful for the life I have lived in this middle-of-nowhere college town.
