Ah, Batavia, New York...

I was born and raised the Town of Tonawanda, a first-ring suburb of Buffalo. As an adult, I moved out to the "country" in Genesee County, Town of Batavia. Always Buffalo-facing, I never gave much thought to the City of Batavia, five miles to the east, other than it being the shopping destination of choice for most of life's daily needs. I came to understand that most of Genesee County is more likely to be Rochester-facing - we got the 585 area code with them, bland pollsters operating from a half a world away assume we watch the Rochester TV stations, and so on. But I never gave much consideration to the idea that any significant number of people could be Batavia-facing.

In March of 2007, Kathleen and I moved into the actual City of Batavia, and since then my perception has been changing.

(But first, here's the stats: the Town of Batavia with its roughly 6,000 inhabitants, encloses the City of Batavia and its 16,000 citizens. The actual border between Town and City gets more smudged every year, as most of the new retail construction on the west end of the "city" is actually in the Town. A better candidate for consolidation is unlikely to be found!)

Our pretty house in the city is on a safe street, in a good neighborhood, with friendly neighbors. Down the street we find the elementary school and its playground, and the high school stadium. We can walk most anywhere in the city and often do, taking trips to the grocery, hardware store, library, racetrack, Tully's, and the whole slew of strip-mall splendor (Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Bed Bath & Beyond, ...), Benny's Barber shop, or just letting Loki lead the way as we explore the streets and parks.

Slowly, I've become more interested in the history of the place. I've just finished reading Bill Kauffman's Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette, in which the author's classic experience of the Native Son returning to his small hometown is set in the very same Batavia. It's his vehicle for bemoaning so much of what's been lost in Small Town America and also celebrating the good in What Remains There, but it's also very much about Batavia. Literate (probably to a fault) and witty (to compensate), Kauffman produces a veritable parade of references that shed light on Batavia so as to almost move it from the Real to the Mythic. You can feel the love, and it's contagious.

But Bill longs for a Batavia that's long gone, not coming back, and also beyond the horizon of my comprehension. They tore apart Main Street to put the Brutalist mall in long before I got there. My Batavia has always had a Tops and a Wal-Mart, GCC and the Thruway. I hardly perceived of Carr's department store before it ceased to exist, and I likely wouldn't have shopped there anyway. The model of American City has always been dynamic, and the snapshot of 1930-1960 is no more or less valid than that of 1970-2000, or whatever comes next for that matter.

Despite all our wreckage - and maybe even in part because of it - the spirit is strong here. But a path back is not the path forward, so the challenge is to find a way to gather up all those values and carry them along into a new and better future. Retailers come and go, and I'm sure in fifty years someone will be out there weeping the bygone days of Wal-Mart. Whatever. The Thruway makes it easy to leave, or pass through, but it can also bring folks to stay. Batavia can be a bedroom community for Buffalo and Rochester, but at some point it needs to attract more local employers to thrive. I'd work at Graham if I could (this year #10 on Forbes' list of top Small Companies), but I don't think they need software engineers, and my mechanical engineer father doesn't won't be coaxed out of retirement, so all I can do is buy their stock.

There's days I want to dig in deep: start a gaming club run out of the library's community room, get an ELCA church started, run for government. But unlike Kauffman, I'm no native son, certainly not yet. (And have you ever tried being a professional software engineer in the downtrodden Upstate? Yikes!) And unlike his pliant wife Lucine, my Kathleen comes from her own place with family that's calling her (and thus, us) home. So where it goes from here is anyone's guess. If I could just convince everyone else to uproot and settle here, that would sure be great.

Meanwhile, I've subscribed to The Batavian, the blog for all things Batavia, and it's been the here-and-now counterpart to Bill's book. And it's cleverly making me consider whether to drop our Buffalo News subscription in favor of the Batavia Daily. I've always championed the Buffalo paper as one of the very few quality big-city papers I've ever come across. I was never even slightly tempted to switch to Rochester's Democrat and Chronicle, which I have been constant in my complete dislike of. But without the Batavia paper, I can see now that I'm missing out on my home town news, to say nothing of supporting the "locals". It's a smaller paper to be sure, so I'll be giving up a lot in losing the Buffalo News, but I know that it has to be just one or the other: I don't have time for both, nor the money for the redundancy.

I'll try to write a few character pieces on Batavia in the future...