“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” If ever there were a Hoosier, it was Kurt Vonnegut. And, to the extent that I understand the essence of being a Hoosier, if ever there was a singularly Hoosier sentiment, it is this quote of his. It was given in interviews and elsewhere, but perhaps most easily discoverable in ‘A Man Without a Country’, a collection of essays he published shortly before his passing in 2007.
I myself am a Hoosier by accident of my birth. The landscape is something special, despite my constant refrain that we’ve got no elevation change. The forests we haven’t surrender to the lumber industry are beautiful. There’s a special joy that comes with watching the horizon slowly disappear between a growing wave of corn, and a larger one that comes with doing 80 down a narrow country road once fall has come, the corn is gone, and visibility has returned.
The people, unfortunately, are a mixed bag I hate to say. Like anywhere, Indiana is full of both good and bad people. And like most places in fly-over country, it’s administered by some of the worst humanity has to offer up. Unfortunately that foulness doesn’t stay in the capital. A fish rots from the head down, as they say. As such, Indiana is not a kind place to grow up different, and whew boy, did I ever manage that. At any rate, it’s safe to say I have a complicated relationship with my home and the people in it.
However, whenever I get particularly angry about my kin and them falling short of what they could be, I think about one of the best we ever produced, Mr. Vonnegut. While there have been many words written on his generous nature, on his beliefs and their complexity, I think he gave a fine summation of them in “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater”: God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.
There were, I’m sure, a great many things driving that belief. Chief among them was a fundamental interest in human beings and the absurd business of being alive. When I am angriest at my fellow Hoosiers, it is because they’ve stopped taking an interest in the world around them, or worse, the people traveling through it beside them. If, as the man said, god damn it you have to be kind, I don’t see how you get there without curiosity. We will never know, truly, what goes on in another person’s head, and that is a shame. Still, if we want even a hope to have some approximation, we have to be curious about one another. I suspect that this was at the heart of Vonnegut’s farting around, drifting through the world with no greater purpose than watching people at the messy business of being alive, although what greater purpose is there really? It’s in that spirit that I relate the following story:
A little while ago, I was enjoying afternoon coffee with an eclectic assortment of people. A Dane, a Frenchman, a Swede, an Iranian, a German, and a Hoosier all walk into a bar if you’ll allow it. We were talking about our work and the weather and the subject of home and differences between places came up. We got on to the topic of packaging, and in particular, the correct way to package yogurt.
The correct way to do it is in a tub, in case you were wondering. As we were espousing the virtues of tub-based-yogurt-packaging to the Swede who has predominantly experienced it in cartons, the Iranian pointed out that the lid-yogurt is somehow better than the tub-yogurt. There is something particularly joyful in a little scrap of food that isn’t quite where it should be in the package that comes home from the grocery store. It’s not as wet, or it has a little less milk flavor and a little more yogurt flavor, or whatever it is. It is small, and it is different, and it is special, and that makes it a joy.
And do you know what? Six people from six different countries all simultaneously agreed that yes, this is a common human experience and that the man was right and that it was a good thing to point out. For a brief moment, nearly half a dozen diaspora were home again, not where they were from, but where they were. And if that isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.