Durangoans, you’re the nicest, most pragmatic people I can imagine climbing into a lifeboat with. I wondered how that happened. I am by nature both curious and a people-watcher, so I began to notice the subtext in our interactions, the small but telling details.
Like this: I sat taking a break during a walk and exchanged a few words with a young man who sat down nearby on the grass, in a patch of sunlight. When the train went by, he leaned back on one elbow, gazed up at the sky, listened, and said, “That train is indicative of what the saving grace is here, as long as Durango honors it … history.”
I was startled; his word choice – “indicative of” – pleased me, and I asked myself, “Who fostered that facility with words? A teacher?”
Then there was the gang of half a dozen high schoolers I encountered when I pulled into a gas station. The beautiful young bicyclists, with their high-end clothes and high-end bicycles, were talking endlessly, full of life, just starting out their ride perhaps, making their first stop, eating energy bars. Two of them walked over to me and one, a young man with a mass of dark curly hair like a movie star’s, asked, “Just wondering if we’re blocking you in here.”
“No, we’re fine … lots of room,” I answered.
“What exceedingly good manners!” I thought. “They wanted to make sure they had left me enough room to maneuver my car. Where did they learn to be so thoughtful? Coach? Not impossible.”
It wasn’t just a younger generation being kind. When I was waiting for my ride, an elderly man and his wife walked by. As they brushed past, this lanky cowboy (looking for all the world like Jimmy Stewart), for no discernible reason, raised his cap and gave me a small salute.
“Why?” I wondered. “When he was still in kneepants, somebody must have taught him lessons in being polite to one’s elders. Grandpa? Or maybe dad?”
My last two examples: First was the grizzled but still good-looking 80-year-old with the long white beard and rumpled jacket. We were waiting in a cashier’s line; he watched as I rearranged my purse, my packages, and scarf and umbrella, then took a step toward me and, with concern in his voice, said, “Be careful outside. There are a lot of puddles ’cause of the rain. You can get your shoes and feet wet.”
Touched, I gushed awkwardly, “Oh, thanks for caring!”
Then, a pretty 60-year-old woman at the gym, it seems, also wished to let me know I was cared about. She passed me two or three times on the track and, as she passed me the last time, she hesitated and, with a soft smile, raised her hands to heart level, put her palms together, and almost imperceptibly bowed to me. I’m no Buddhist but was familiar with the gesture, which honored the humanity in each of us. She’d left me with a rush of feeling for the notion of “spirit.”
So many good-hearted Durangoans! My everlasting question: How did they get this way?
I got an answer.
The telling moment came at a car repair shop. I sat reading a book and an overgrown teenager in a plaid shirt sat opposite me on a stool. He was eating very rapidly from a box of popcorn, dropping some on the floor.
“Humph!” I said to myself. “He’s making a mess.”
After finishing his popcorn, he got off the stool and picked up every single dropped piece of popcorn from the floor.
I said, “I was wondering if you were going to pick it all up.”
He grinned and told me, “I had to. My mom taught us that, and she wouldn’t have stood for it if we didn’t!”
There was my answer.
Jo Gibson of Durango is a former English department adjunct faculty member at Cleveland State University and a freelance writer with the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
