0
Stu
The first inkling that something is amiss is the lack of snow. It’s a slow realization, and the people of Green Valley at first walk around as if they are trying to remember something they forgot - did I turn off the stove when I left? Did I close the garage? And some of them did go home to check on these things, but no, that’s not it. There is something off about this Festival day, something not quite right.
The most special thing about Green Valley is the near perfection within which it exists. It never rains of the Fourth of July picnic. It is always sunny on a parade day. The springs are perfect, with just the right mixture of sunshine and rain to ensure a beautiful harvest of azaleas and Impatiens and roses in every yard. The summers are hot and dry, except when rain is needed, and then it rains. The autumns are colorful and spectacular and the weather is always perfect on Halloween; nippy enough to make it feel right, warm enough so the kids can wear their costumes without a jacket. And it always snows on the opening Saturday of the Winter Festival. Always. To an outsider, Green Valley exists in a snow globe and some giant hand of fate always shakes the snow globe on just the right day.
But not today. Jackie Fetterling is the first to notice and she tugs at her mother’s jacket, concern etched on her eight-year old face.
“Where’s the snow, mommy?” Mrs. Fetterling looks up. The sky is clear and blue. Not a single cloud blemishes the scene.
“Oh, dear.” Mrs. Fetterling brings her hands to her throat in a flutter of worry. “This isn’t right.”
And then the murmurs starts, from the men on the ladders, stringing garland across the light poles, to the ladies in the Civic Club handing out hot cocoa and bagels, to the children collecting canned goods for the needy, to Hank Hoffman, struggling to get the Santa costume over his gut.
“It’s…not snowing!”
“How weird”
“What the hell?”
“I’ve never seen the sky so god damn blue.”
A sense of unease settles throughout the town square as everyone cranes their neck skyward, expectantly, as if dark snow clouds will suddenly swoop in, apologizing for their lateness. After a few minutes, the Green Valley residents get back to their Winter Festival duties, but the unease lingers.
Over at the radio station, Stu McLundy is drinking his boss’s Jack Daniels from his boss’s dixie cups. The kind with the riddles on them. It’s 9:59 am on Saturday morning and Stu McLundy already has a buzz on. No, more than a buzz. Stu McLundy is about to, for the first time, do his radio show - Scratch and Skip With Stu McLundy - while drunk. And this isn’t just any Saturday edition of Scratch and Skip. This is the Green Valley Winter Festival edition, the one in which he blindly MCs the festivities from the studio, a smattering of phone calls giving him cues as to when to make which announcement. He is to do this all day, calling Hank up to the podium, announcing the junior high kickline and the John Glenn Memorial Elementary chorus, presiding over the pledge of allegiance and playing the hits of the 70’s and various Christmas songs, all piped into the town square over loudspeakers. At 6:00, Stu will close his show with The DeFranco Family’s Heartbeat and walk over to the square to announce the official lighting of the town and the beginning of the Green Valley holiday season.
Stu Lundy has been doing this radio show for fifteen years. Weeknights from six to ten and Saturdays from ten to six. His voice is as part of the town as any fire hydrant or flagpole. A fixture. No one in Green Valley knows that Stu was fired last night. No one knows that Maurice Fetterling, owner of the radio station, sold him out last night to some corporate machine with a computer that plays music and a disembodied voice called Jack who would introduce the “more varied” songs that would play on the station. No more Heartbeat. No more sounds of the 70s. No more Stu McLundy. He’s not supposed to tell anyone about the demise of his show until after the winter festival but Stu Lundy is drunk and a drunk man sometimes forgets the promises he makes.
Stu starts off his show with a Motown version of Winter Wonderland. When the song ends, he breaths heavy into the microphone, forgetting for a minute where he is and what he’s supposed to be doing. Dead air.
The town stops. Holds its breath. Stu sighs and says “Scratch and Skip. Holiday edition. Stu McLundy here.” His voice is heavy and thick and reeks of sadness and is not at all the happy-go-lucky, smooth baritone the residents of Green Valley are used to hearing.
Greta Harrington makes the sign of the cross. Hank Hoffman drops his coffee cup. Everyone eyes the loudspeakers the same way the eyed the empty sky; incredulous, nervous. Something is very, very wrong in Green Valley.
Stu puts the needle down on The Night the Lights Went out in Georgia. He introduces the song: “You can also say this is the day the lights went out in Green Valley.” He slurs some constants, lingers on some vowels and as his elbow hits the needle a long, high-pitches skreeeeeech is amplified through the town square. A few people put their hands to their ears. Hank Hoffman turns white. Mrs. Fetterling dials her soon-to-be ex husband on her cell phone. And Stu McLundy simply picks up the needle, mutters an oops into the microphone, and starts the song over again. He fills his Dixie riddle cup and throws back another course of his Jack Daniels breakfast.
Grant
The noise of my air conditioner going at full blast all evening - I keep it going even in winter to keep the sound of life going on outside my house from coming in - drowned out the sounds of the world falling apart, so I was caught completely unaware this morning.
I suppose I didn’t feel the earth move or the house shake because I had gone to bed piss drunk and just a bit strung out on Vicodin.
I should explain. I’m not always like that. I just had a bad day. Well, a bad week. My girlfriend left me, my dog ran away, my latest art exhibit sold only one painting and, well, you’ve probably heard stories like mine before. Up until last week, my life was moving along rather smoothly. Monday came and suddenly the world had it in for me. It was a gang killing, I tell you. Tuesday stabbed me, Wednesday shot me, Thursday hog-tied me and made me watch Celine Dion videos.
And now, Sunday. The world has gone to hell, it seems. My street is on fire and I think the old Brown house imploded. Trees have sunk into the ground, cars are spinning in mid-air and the children – my GOD, the children – they are like roving gangs of attack dogs, stalking up and down the street, seemingly oblivious to the flames and whatnot. Whatever happened yesterday while I was in my pity-me stupor has given the neighborhood children an evil dose of rabies.
My first thought is to turn on the television to see what the hell is going on, but I guess when your town is aflame and the sidewalks have buckled, the cable will go kaput. Same for the internet. Which is a moot point, as my computer has slid off the desk and onto the floor in a heap of plastic shards and wires. The F4 key shot straight across the room, into the eye socket of my poseable Spider-Man and he appears to be winking a hint to “save as” before it all goes to hell. Too late, Spidey. I step on B, curse a little and that’s when I hear the pounding at the front door.
It’s the kids. They look feral and hungry and, well, scary. I’m a grown man. A grown man with a hangover and the dulling effects of Vicodin still lingering in his brain, but a man nonetheless. I will not let some children, rabid or otherwise, make me afraid in my own home. Right. I stamp my foot down for good measure. No one is there to see my indignation except me and the fruit flies that have gathered over my kitchen sink. It’s like a convention over there and I forget the deranged children for a moment as I imagine a fruit fly convention, complete with entertainment and little name tags and a registration desk. What kind of lectures to they have? Will they be dining on my rotten bananas at the lunch lecture? Is babysitting available?
(Now, don’t think I’ve lost my mind. No, I’ve always had thoughts like this. My brain is somewhat…scattered. Easily distracted. And I’m probably still drunk at this point)
The pounding at the door starts up again. The kids are still there and I think one of them is gnawing at the doorhandle. I decide to be brave.
“What? What do you want?”
“Gunh. Ugnhur. Gnnnarrrr!”
“Come again?”
“GUNHHHHHHURRG!”
Ok, so they’ve lost their ability to speak. This is wonderful. Grunting, rabid children who appear to be very hungry and not at all unlikely to eat a fellow human. I slide the deadbolt closed, realizing how futile it is. It does give me a brief moment of feeling like I’ve done something to protect myself, though. I take what I can get.
“Mr. Grant! Mr. Grant!”
Oh, lord. It’s Mrs. Beasley, that bat who lives next door to the Browns (who, apparently, no longer live anywhere) and who has an unnerving habit of putting a Mr. in front of my first name. I hear her voice above the cacophony of grunts and groans and fire and crumbling buildings. Her voice is that shrill, that high all the time, though in this instant it’s tinged with a bit of panic. I look out the small window in my door and I see Mrs. Beasley standing on my walkway, holding this morning’s paper and looking for all the world like the universe is not imploding around her.
“Mr. Grant, my Sasha peed on your newspaper!” Sasha being her little fucker of a dog – some small, yapping, obnoxious white piece of fluff that’s supposed to be descended directly from royal dog blood or some shit like that. Mrs. Beasley does not seem to be aware that the Grimwald boy is tearing at her house dress, teeth bared and eyes blazing. This annoys me more than alarms me. I expect that if I’m going to go into full panic mode about a situation that everyone will panic right along with me. It’s like going to the doctor, alarmed that you’ve developed a strange growth on your back and the doctor, instead of looking as alarmed as you did upon discovering the growth, seems to think it’s all a run of the mill annoyance. It’s infuriating. Hello? Panic? Alarm? Are you with me or not? Because if you’re not going to settle into my mode of hysteria, then I’m going to label you an immediate enemy.
So now I’m staring at Mrs. Beasley like she’s the spawn of Satan himself.
“Open the door, Grant. I know you’re home!” She’s staggering up the walk – staggering because she’s dragging the Grimwald boy behind her and he’s gnawing on her baggy-stockinged leg, spitting out pieces of hosiery as he tries to get to the meat. “I just want to pay you for the newspaper and apologize for Sasha’s incontinence.” The last syllable of incontinence goes up a notch in pitch and Mrs. Beasley disappears from my view. Alarmed, I slide open the deadbolt and open the door just a crack. That’s enough to see that the Grimwald boy has pulled Mrs. Beasley to the ground and is about to latch onto her face with his mouthful of baby teeth. I contemplate this for a minute, wondering why he would go for her gaunt face which is nothing more than wrinkles held together by a slab of foundation. Why not the midsection, or leg, somewhere meaty where a growing boy could get some nutrition? This gives me an idea for a drawing, but the idea is lost when my reverie is broken by a high pitched wail. It’s coming from the boy, not Mrs. Beasely. I fling the door open, forsaking my own safety (sorry, I feel the need to point that out, because I look like an ass up until now). Sasha is dragging the kid off of Mrs. Beasley, her teeth firmly set into the boy’s arm. There’s blood, there’s screaming, there’s growling and there’s Mrs. Beasley looking like she just woke up from a ten year coma and is surprised to find out that gas is four dollars a gallon. She looks around at the boy, her dog, the crumbling houses and spinning cars and asks “Did something happen here, Mr. Grant?”
“Something. Yes.”
She pulls Sasha off the boy and kisses her nose.
“It would be polite to ask me in, Grant.”
“Would you like to come in, Mrs. Beasley?” She smiles at me. You know how sometimes you will glance at an old lady, like your grandmother, or your aunt – the one who smells like death – and you see something in them, just a small, brief glimmer, that makes you think they must have once been beautiful young women? Yea, not so much with Mrs. Beasley. Something in her smile makes me think she was an ugly, sour kid, the kind who was destined to become a lonely old lady walking her incontinent dog in her bathrobe every morning.
I clear the couch of plaster that has been raining down from the ceiling and offer Mrs. Beasley a seat. Sasha is dripping blood out of her mouth, and I think she peed on my rug, but the resale value of this house has gone to shit in the past few hours anyhow.
Another high pitched squeal from outside, not as feral as the boy’s. Before I can figure out the source of the scream, the front door flies open and there’s Terri, the neurotic high school kid from next door. She’s babbling about vampires, aliens, robots, the rapture, nuclear war and something about never getting on Facebook again. She’s freaking out at a million miles an hour and I let her go until her freak engine has run itself out. She collapses on the floor and curls up into a little ball of Armageddon sorrow. Sasha runs over to her, licks her face a few times and pees on the girl’s leg.
“Mr. Grant?” Mrs. Beasely stands up, smooths out her housedress. “Do you think you could take me dancing at the Copacabana tonight?”
I take stock of the situation. Outside: end of the world, feral, flesh eating children. Inside: An old lady with sudden onset dementia, a teenage girl with OCD and Sasha the Incontinent Wonder Pup. I have all the makings of a failed sitcom.
And that’s how the first hour or so of the day of destruction played out.
I’m an artist. Or, I was an artist. Sometimes I made a living from it, and sometimes I had to resort to things like painting portraits of pretentious families to pay the bills. I don’t really do people. I do abstract, I do surreal, I do multi-media art that stuffy old people refer to as piles of rubbish, but hip kids see as meaningful and worthy of a shitload of their parent’s money. I’ll be honest, most of it is rubbish. Sure, I was all into it in the beginning. I had passion and zeal and a real grasp of how to present the problems of the world artistically using items retrieved from recycling bins and a lot of paint. I sculpted, I created, I painted, I built. I drank. And I drank. And I began to like the drinking more than I liked the creating. Soon I was building sculptures out of empty vodka bottles and vomit. Ok, they weren’t sculptures so much as a mess in my bedroom and living room. But they were art to me. That puke came from inside me as much as any painting.
I stopped doing shows. Well, I was stopped from doing shows. No one wants to do a meet and greet with an artist that looks and smells like he just finished a ten day bender. And no one particularly wants to see an artist smash his own sculpture to the ground in a fit of rage because who the fuck’s idea was it to have an alcohol free showing? Oh, it was to benefit a halfway house for alcoholics? Someone should have told me. You did? Oh.
So I painted more, sculpted less, made a few appearances at comic cons where I sold a bunch of drawings of Aquaman and Superman making out in the last row of a movie theater that was showing Hedwig and the Angry Inch and generally became a hack.
I started painting family portraits by accident. Maybe that’s not the right word. By circumstance. No, that’s not right, either. Ok, I’ll tell you. I slept with a girl that was younger than I thought – relax, she was 18 – and her father got all bent out of shape about it and threatened to tell the owner of the gallery where I had a big show that week to cancel my show. Golf buddies, turns out. We came to a compromise instead. I would paint a portrait of his family for free and he would not ruin my career. Which was still a career at the time. And he didn’t want me to paint off a photograph. They were going to sit for the painting. He was going to taunt me with the presence of his daughter Camilla. Delicious Camilla.
The family sat the way most rich families sat for these things: on a gold velvet couch with ornately carved armrests, the mother and father standing behind the couch with the five children lined up on the seat like prizes. The father looked stern yet loving, the mother like she would not know how to exist without the instruction of her husband, grasping onto his arm like a life preserver, and the kids all looking like they would rather be playing video games or watching tv or, in the case of Delicious Camilla, fucking the artist. I swear, she kept winking at me. Licking her lips. I was glad I wore my baggy jeans. The whole time I painted, I was thinking, I have been under that girl’s dress. I have been in her panties. I have been in her. I tried using telepathy on the father. Your daughter has a lovely pussy. Your daughter has the most beautiful tits I have ever seen. Your daughter giggles after she has an orgasm. But the father stood there the whole time, stoic. I swear, he didn’t blink once. He just shot invisible lasers out of his eyes and into my crotch.
I tell you all this to better explain what happened in the hour after Sasha peed on Terri. Mostly, we just sat there terrified and clueless as to what to do about the zombie children outside. But I fixed the situation the way my mother fixed everything; I cooked. Ok, it was just macaroni and cheese and chicken hot dogs. Still, I cooked. We ate and cleaned up, trying to ignore the guttural noises outside and then I didn’t know what to do with them. They seemed to be looking to me for leadership and all I wanted was to go back in my bedroom and find the rest of the Vicodin. Maybe if I took enough to lapse into a coma, I’d wake up when this was all over. The National Guard would arrive, the feral kids would be corralled, the town would be cleaned up and I’d wake up in a clean, white walled hospital being sponge bathed by a nurse who looked like Nicole Kidman.
Obviously, I’m not much of a leader.
When we were done eating, Terri and Mrs. Beasley went and sat on the couch. Just sat there. They didn’t talk, they didn’t look at each other. Terri tilted her head back a bit and stared at the ceiling, her mouth hanging open like it was too tired to bother closing. Mrs. Beasley sat next to her, prim and proper, hands folded in her lap, an expectant look on her face, as if she was waiting for me to turn on the tv. She must watch something after lunch. A soap opera, Oprah, Law and Order repeats, whatever it is that old, nearly insane people watch. Fox News? Sasha jumped up on her lap and the three of them sat there – the dumfounded kid, the batty old woman and the dog who wouldn’t stop peeing – and they looked for all the world like a painting out of some bizarre…….you see where this is going, right? I mean, why the fuck not? If this end of the world shit wasn’t really the end of the world but just some short term clusterfuck, a painting like this would be gold. I could see the write ups.
ARTIST CAPTURES THE EMOTIONAL TOLL OF THE GREAT CLUSTERFUCK OF 2009.
Wait.
BRILLIANT ARTIST CAPTURES THE EMOTIONAL TOLL OF THE GREAT CLUSTERFUCK OF 2009.
That’s better.
So I painted. For two hours I painted. I painted while sharp toothed children screamed for blood. I painted while the sounds of screaming metal and small explosions punctured the afternoon. I painted while strange people tapped on the window begging to be let in. The kid and the lady seemed oblivious to it all, probably in some sort of post-Armageddon shock. I imagined them to be a nightmare version of American Gothic so in the painting I put the couch out in front of a white farm house, which ended up being turned into a white church and my sofa ended up being a gold piece with ornate wood much like Delicious Camilla’s. I drew Sasha with a pool of piss puddling underneath her on Mrs. Beasley’s dress and Terri with a bit of drool hanging out of her gaping mouth and had to stop myself from making Elvis appear between them.
“Crazy hat day.” Terri spoke for the first time since she walked in the door. Of course it was something nonsensical.
“Excuse me, dear?” Mrs. Beasley addressed her without actually facing her.
“Crazy hat day. Yesterday was supposed to be crazy hat day at school. Except they wouldn’t let us call it crazy hat day even though it was called crazy hat day for, like ever. I mean, it’s the day before the Winter Festival. It’s always crazy hat day. The person with the craziest hat gets to turn the star on the Christmas tree. But they said the word crazy is demeaning to actual crazy people. Not crazy like people on Adderall and Xanax because that’s like everyone, but crazy like people who live in mental wards and get tied up in straight jackets. So I was like, Mr. Benson, why the fuck is someone who is crazy enough to be in a mental ward going to care if some teenagers in some shitty little town label their hats as crazy? That’s so retarded. And Mr. Benson was like, well suppose you had a mother or brother or even aunt who was crazy. Wouldn’t you be offended by crazy hat day? And I was like uhh dude. I’m offended by this conversation. And it was so weird because, like, who messes up Winter Festival? And that was just the first thing that was messed up and we were all like, but you can’t mess up the festival. But he took away crazy hat day anyhow, and made it silly hat day and we were all going to wear just normal hats in protest. You know, instead of hats with like Christmas decorations on them or stuff sticking out of them or whatever. Just normal hats.”
“What were you going to wear?” I asked her. What can I say, I was curious.
“A Boston Red Sox hat.”
“That’s kind of crazy, no?”
“Why?”
“Because you live in New York.”
“Well, it’s an understated kind of crazy then. Which is not crazy at all. Just smart.”
The way she said that was almost crazy in itself. After the run on thought that was the crazy hat day soliloquy, it was surprising to hear her speak in a normal, almost adult tone.
“I think your hat is lovely, dear.” Mrs. Beasley was still staring straight ahead.
“I’m not wearing a hat.”
“Of course you are, you silly girl.”
“And that’s my point exactly,” Terri said to me. “Only weird old people use the word silly.”
I finished up the sitting part of the painting. I would do touch ups and whatever else later. I stood back and surveyed my work and god damn it was good. Probably my best work ever. Sure, the older crowd would think it horrifying but the younger crowd – particularly the ones who said things like “The broken window in the church represents the abandonment of ourselves to religion” or “I think the drool coming from her mouth is in essence the salivation one feels at the prospect of the world ending” – would eat this shit up.
Then there was a scream. A Jamie Lee Curtis scream that made me think of deranged slashers and the sticky floor of the Clearview Cinema. The scream ended abruptly and was replaced by a string of obscenities shouted by a familiar voice. At first I couldn’t place it. A man’s voice, deep and soothing even though it was saying things like “It’s the fucking commies! It has to be the work of commies. Get the fuck off me you teethy little fucker!” The voice sounded strange, like it was in the wrong place at the wrong time. A voice I was used to hearing with a little less bass. A…..holy hell, it was Stu McLundy. Scratch and Skip with Stu McLundy! I looked out the little peephole in my front door and there he was, holy shit there he was. And he was in a god damn Santa Claus outfit. And then it hit me. The Winter Festival. All this crap that happened while I was sleeping off a self induced coma happened during the Winter Festival. Shit like this just didn’t happen in Green Valley. But it did, didn’t it? Well, ho ho holy fuck.
It was time to see what this whole end of the world thing was about .
Green Valley
First, I need to tell you a bit about this town. Otherwise you might be thinking “how the hell does this bachelor artist dude know all his neighbors? People like that don’t mingle with suburbanites. Hell, people like that that don’t even live in the suburbs. What is this guy’s deal anyway? Hey, are you gay?”
Sorry, I get that a lot. Thought I’d get it out of the way.
No.
Anyhow, this place. You know that bar where everyone knows your name? Green Valley is that town. It’s the sort of place one passes through and says “Oh, how quaint,” but rarely stops to investigate the quaintness. It’s charming and cute and old-fashioned, but tourists on their way wineries or beaches don’t like charming and cute unless it’s complete with faux boutiques selling designer jewelry and specialty clothing stores where you can purchase a $400 tie designed by some aging rock star, with all proceeds going to PETA. We don’t have that here. We have stores that sell second hand Precious Moments and plastic frogs with felt eyes, little froggy hands holding up a sign that says “I’d croak without you.”
Green Valley is old-fashioned not because it wants to be a tourist trap for people missing their youth, but because it never changed. At least not outwardly.
Back in the late 60’s, a developer planted some grass seeds and broke ground on the hopes and dreams of thousands of nuclear families. As the grass took root and poked out of the ground, houses did the same, cookie cutter enclaves rising up from freshly dug foundations. The streets were paved and made to wind and curve and flow into each other and given names of flowers and trees and dead presidents. Flowers were planted, half-grown trees placed into the ground and a smart little town was born. The green in Green Valley was all newly grown or shipped in and there was no valley to speak of, but the powers that be who named the place thought it sounded peaceful and idyllic and quaint and people really dug that stuff in the late 1960’s.
So families like mine moved into Green Valley and it became one of those places where people make root, which is another way of saying they never leave. Kids grew up, graduated, got married and bought houses three blocks from their parents and had children who went to the same schools they did. I went to school with people named Fetterling and Freeman and Weiss and Hoffman and then after high school (in quaint towns people tend to get married soon after high school) there would be a Freeman-Hoffman merger, making little Freeman-Hoffman children who would grow up to buy the same kind of house their parents owned, in the same town. Or they would be like me and actually buy their parent’s house. My folks did the proper old person thing and moved to Florida when Dad retired. That’s their story, anyhow. I think they just got tired of dealing with the “Is Grant gay?” thing.
Some houses expanded; larger kitchens were added on, sky-high dormers were plopped down on top and driveways were widened to fit the Suburbans and Navigators that dotted the roads of Green Valley like dinosaurs. But mostly, everything remains the same. The Shelley house still has the wishing well out front and the Paulson house still has the shag, olive-green carpet in the family room and the Robertsons still have their Dodge Dart with the AM push button radio. Well, last I looked. For all I know they all went the way of the Brown house which is to say, gone.
Inside the homes, behind the walls, life is current and kids hover around the tv playing Grand Theft Auto and married men pick up lonely housewives in chat rooms and the dishwashers and central air conditioning are all state of the art. But on the very surface of Green Valley there remains a thin layer of nostalgia, as if the residents can’t quite escape the grasp of the past.
On the weekends, Green Valley works and plays in unison - at least from 10 to 6 - to the sounds of Scratch and Skip with Stu Lundy. You know, the guy who is standing on my front lawn in a Santa suit fighting off feral children. He’s what Green Valley has in the form of celebrity. His radio show plays nothing but oldies, cheesy pop records from the 60s and 70s and everyone in Green Valley listens to him and these songs and loves it all in a completely unironic way. Stu’s voice and those records are everywhere on Saturday. From the auto dealer to every garage sale, every store and home, wafts the smooth baritone of Stu and the soundtrack that keeps Green Valley firmly cocooned in a world that has yet to outgrow bellbottoms and transistor radios. You can go from store to store and home to home without missing a beat, starting “Oh ho, ho, it’s magic” at the corner of Main and Petunia and ending up with the fade of “never believe, it’s not so” at the open air flea market at Main and Kennedy. I stay here because of this is. The life of an artist is never stable, never consistent. But here in Green Valley, stability and consistency are the hallmark of living. What seems stale to an outsider is pure comfort to me. You know how some people eat grilled cheese and tomato soup when they want to feel comfort? That’s what Stu Lundy and the rituals of this town give me. They feed my soul when everything else about my life makes it want to shrivel up and die. Ok, sure. The alcohol and Vicodin also provide that, to an extent.
If you come out to Green Valley on any holiday, you’ll understand. The Fourth of July town picnic with its oompa bands and corn shucking contest; the way Main Street (yes, it’s really called Main Street) is dressed up for Christmas. It’s the Halloween parade and the fall square dance and New Year’s Eve ball that make one feel lured in by the simple life; the place in the past where people weren’t so busy and inattentive that they could get all get together on the Friday after Thanksgiving to decorate Main Street and drink the gallons of hot chocolate and marshmallows provided by the Green Valley Women’s Civic Club.
The motto of Green Valley – emblazoned on a hand carved wooden sign at the entrance to town – is “The Happiest Place on Earth.” That the town has yet to receive a cease and desist letter from Disney always amazes me.
Was Green Valley really the happiest place on earth? Were the shag rugs and Christmas pageants and Dodge Darts in the driveway enough to swallow up whatever loneliness or despair or frustration went on behind the drapes and mini-blinds?
Probably not.