When I moved to South Royalton 32 years ago people here didn’t seem to like me.
I soon found out why. I talked too fast and too much, like a vacuum cleaner salesman trying to clinch a sale. And I was impatient in lines, smirking and rolling my eyes at the inconvenience of having to wait.
In short, I was a flatlander, someone born and raised outside of the Green Mountains in the competitive, pushy America where everyone is in a big rush on their way to success.
My housemate in South Royalton, Carol Brock, who had moved here in 1980, six years before me, gave me the solution to my personality problem: “You need to do your time in Vermont.”
That sounded like a jail sentence, or a kind of penance. But that isn’t what she meant.
She meant marination, not rehabilitation.
I needed a long soak in the easy-going, noncompetitive environment of the Green Mountains. It would take time, and only then could I hope to soften up my rigid, brittle, fast-talking, city-slicker personality.
Carol and I had graduated from the same flatlander Ivy League school in 1980. Six years later, when I found myself with three college degrees pumping gas and running a cash register at the Texaco in White River Junction for $3.75 an hour, my friend and former classmate had more words of wisdom for me: “You have to wait your turn in Vermont.”
What she meant was, there were so few full-time jobs in Vermont that, no matter how qualified you think you are, you simply have to wait until there is an opening.
“Vermonters,” she said, “cobble together three or four part-time jobs and make a living.”
So I worked at Texaco 14 hours a day on Saturday and Sunday, at a Quechee gift store from 4-8 p.m. Monday through Friday, and was an apartment superintendent for Faith, Hope and Charity, a nonprofit group that owned two multi-family dwellings in Randolph near what was then called Gifford Memorial Hospital, working 20 hours a week mowing lawns, shoveling snow, fixing toilets, collecting rents, etc.
And, whenever I could get the job, I also was a substitute teacher for $27.50 a day, from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.
I was waiting my turn. I was doing my time. I was becoming a Vermonter.
I got another piece of Vermont wisdom from the 77-year-old treasurer of Faith, Hope and Charity who wrote my paycheck every two weeks. Her name was Carolyn Sass and she was a transplanted flatlander herself.
“When you drive on the local roads,” she said, “and a car heads toward you, you will find that the driver waves at you. This isn’t a mistaken-identity wave. It is just a local custom.”
This was long before the internet, before cellphones, before Global Positioning Systems. I have come to believe that the wave was really a way of alerting on-coming traffic that all is well up ahead on Vermont’s lonely two-lane roadways, where there can be a mile or two between houses — and therefore phones — where you can get help.
But I have another theory: It’s not really a wave, it’s just an upraised hand, almost like the pope’s blessing. And my flatlander hunch is that, because Vermont was (and still is) among the least-populated states in the Union, drivers here wave at oncoming traffic as a kind of “it’s-nice-to-see-another-human-being” greeting.
And a safe greeting, too, since it didn’t require any awkward face-to-face conversation between a crusty Yankee and a stranger, just a passing acknowledgement from behind the comforting screen of a windshield.
My housemate Carol had two other pieces of advice: Hug the center of the road when you drive on Vermont highways, and wear boots in mud season but carry a clean set of shoes in a plastic bag for when you go out visiting.
I am happy to report, 32 years later, that after two years of part-time jobs and waiting my turn, I found a job — a career — teaching high school English, from which I retired recently after 25 years.
As for doing my time: I can report that I don’t talk as much or as fast as I used to. Sometimes I actually out-Vermont a Vermonter with my one- or two-word sentences.
But I still have that “citified” quality that I just can’t shake. I even wear a necktie, a sure sign that I don’t know where I am.
I have been much more successful at being patient in lines. I actually smile a little when I get stuck behind someone who is taking forever in the grocery line. Which beings me to one of my all-time favorite Vermont stories.
Twenty years ago, I was stuck in line at a large grocery store in Rutland with eight people in front of me. The person checking out seemed to be taking forever — at least seven or eight minutes — fussing and fussing and fussing.
Suddenly, everyone in line started applauding, and so did other customers and cashiers. I leaned over and asked the person in front of me what was going on.
It turns out that the customer at the cash register had just bought $197 worth of groceries and paid for every single cent of it with coupons. She didn’t have to lay out any cash at all. It was a tremendous achievement, and everyone knew it.
If Vermont hadn’t marinated me into an easy-going customer, I would have bolted from that line and store and missed this momentous consumer victory.
At last, here was proof: I had done my time in Vermont.
Paul Keane lives in Hartford