Observations on Ohio

I have met some of the most open-hearted, mature, decent people I've ever met in my seventy years since I moved here to Ohio eighteen months ago: my neighbors, a few friends whom I see regularly, and some souls I've met simply for a fleeting moment. I feel awe just in thinking of them.

On the other hand, my first impressions were primarily from the people with whom I was necessarily involved at first: real estate agents, banking officers, painters, plumbers, inspectors, utility company phone answerers, police, paint store and home center store personnel, pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, thieves. They seemed to me then as they still do, almost without exception, to be corrupt to the core and incredibly incompetent.

A plumber who did some work for me said these exact words: “I can see right away that you are one of the good guys, but this isn't New Hampshire.” He obviously knew nothing about New Hampshire.

An exemplary problem I had to solve was to repair a water leak at the valve where the water pipe to my house joins the street main. The water department told me that the leak was on my side and that I had the responsibility to fix it. The fix cost me $2,600 and took three months, but in the process we discovered that the leak was on the city's side and so was actually the city's responsibility. The city inspector came by and said, yes, but “If you try to fight this you will lose.”

I happened last night to be reading in Jung's Children's Dreams: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1940, which came out in 2008, and I was struck by a passage in which he asserts his explanation of “America,” meaning the U.S.A:

In America, a fusion of the lower part with the virginal earth – where primitive man lives – takes place. As a consequence, consciousness stays above, removed from the primitive functions: ideals on the one hand, primitiveness on the other. This explains much of what is absurd in America. The ground of the basement has sunk a few meters. There is no access: the door to the basement is walled up, the stairs leading down are missing, so the American is living in a world of reasonableness and idealism. It was an American who invented the League of Nations! If an American wants to go into his lower regions, he will have to make a leap into the dark. That is why often those “perverse” stories can happen...A person with warmth and blood is below, unconscious; above everything happens “correctly,” respectably. The person above does not see the person below.

That seems to capture a lot of what I see here and to fit in with what Hawthorne - “that blue-eyed Nathaniel,” D. H. Lawrence called him - says in The Scarlet Letter about that absurdity.

I often ask people when I visit a new place what the book is, especially a novel, that best describes the people who live there. The one suggestion I have received here was JamesThurber. Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio seems to be highly regarded in literary circles but seems a bit damaged by the Freudianism of the times it was written. There is a poet named Paul Lawrence Dunbar, who lived  here in Dayton, who was very perceptive and articulate. Erma Bombeck, who lived just down the street from where I live, is funny, humorous, but she does capture something I see and feel here.

A word about “America” and “New Hampshire” before I go. It's very common in Europe to refer to the United States of America as “America,” as Jung did above, and I sometimes still hear that expression in the U.S. However, I became aware many years ago that people in Central and South America resent this usage, considering themselves to be “Americans,” too. The meaning that now comes to many minds by the phrase “the Americans” is “the indigenous peoples who have lived here since before Columbus.”

And New Hampshire, dear old New Hampshire. No one I've met here has ever visited it and I find they often confuse it with New Jersey.