My Small Town: Recounting the Joys of Village Living

Reader Contribution by Cam Mather
Published on December 12, 2013
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You know what song I think is great? “Small Town” by John Cougar Mellencamp.

I’ve always loved this song, even in 1985 when it came out and I was living in suburbia. I wasn’t “born in a small town” but “I’ll probably die in a small town.” And it’s a great town. Or a village to be more precise.

We’ve lived here 15 years now and it’s taken that long for me to really start feeling that it’s “my town.” This comes from shopping here, and shipping parcels from the post office, and doing workshops, and playing hockey, and being on committees, and helping out at special events and generally inflicting myself on the village as often as I possibly can.

Saturday was an awesome day for me in my small town. I took a CPR/AED workshop put on by the firefighters. I didn’t know what an AED was, so I looked it up on Wikipedia and it discovered that it is an “automated external defibrillator” and can be used when someone has a myocardial infarction … you know, a heart attack. When the instructor asked if anyone knew the correct term for a heart attack, well, let’s just say I looked like a genius. I used to watch the TV series, “ER” so I was familiar with the term. And I was also familiar with the use of a defibrillator when they jam those pads on a patient and yell “CLEAR!!!” and hit them with 50,000 Volts or whatever it is and the patient convulses back to life. Needless to say I was pretty disappointed to discover that the modern automated units are small, subtle, talk you through the process and use way less voltage. You still have to keep your hands off the person, but if you forget to remove your hands it sounds like the experience is more like touching an electric fence than a high voltage transmission line. Like all good country folk I am quite familiar with the jolt of an electric fence, even though I should never admit it publicly.

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