always someplace worse than where you are
The mizzus was riding the other day with our state senator Mary Margaret, over to a conference on putting up historical signs for Island county. Mostly on Whidbey since nobody over there had ever heard of Camano Island and couldn’t imagine it even having a history if nobody knew it existed.
Whidbey, of course, has its own South End. The commuters live there. It’s a company town for Boeing really, but the State drives em to the plant on our ferry.
Mary Margaret said when she was a girl she always felt like a second class citizen around the schoolkids of Stanwood, Camano Island in those days being a sort of Tijuana for the Skandihoovian Upper Classes of the fabled Twin Cities. I guess it’s important to most folks to have someone to look down on. Course now we’re more enlightened. And the Stanwoodites need our purchasing power so the whispering goes on out of range of our hearing now.
Mary Margaret was saying how one day she was telling her mama how she felt belittled by all the uppity teasing and why was the world so mean. And her mama, trying to make her feel a little better, a little brighter in this dark cold world, trying to lift her spirits in the shadow of that bullying, stuck up, snot-nosed Stanwood, her mama said, well, Mary Margaret, you cheer up. It could be worse. At least you don’t live down at the South End.
Somehow I suspect the mizzus and Mary Margaret aren’t going to get a Historical Marker for us South Enders….
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