Growing Up Wallace-The Basics

It was the stability, silly. Oh yes, the stability of sameness. Sameness, the same thing that drives folks bonkers in this day and age. Sameness, the thing that made social cliques pretty much impossible. Of course there were the different groups that would hang together. There was little room for too much smugness, though, because basically, all of our fathers worked pretty much one way or another for the mines. Of course there were merchants, teachers, plumbers, medical people, loggers, and so on, but most of life, one way or another centered around those rich veins of ore buried deep within the mountains of jewels of the canyon. ( While we are at it, let's be real. We were really more of a "canyon" than a "valley".)

So, the sameness formed a strong bond between the young and the restless , the old and the weary, and the middle aged and the up and coming.

My mother saved everything about my life ,and I mean everything. I was looking at the program for my kindergarten graduation ceremony, and the names on that program were pretty much the same names that were listed on my high school graduation program 12 years later. There was a sameness, a bonding, a stability. We were all citizens of Wallace. We were Wallacites.