On Saturday of our sojourn to southern Indiana, my Dad took Rob and me to Ellis Park, a Thoroughbred Race Track in Henderson, KY. He'd been given tickets from a friend, so we even got to go up to the fancy upper deck section of the stadium - "the box". It was a blistering day, so we were thankful to be in the air conditioning, and the view!
We arrived about forty-five minutes before the first race, so we found our table and started looking around. Rob and I are big people watchers, so we were quite fascinated by our company. At first we felt like anthropologists who'd been plopped down in an alien landscape:
- The style (hair, clothes, general mannerisms, speech patterns) were definitely "foreign" to us. In Seattle it is more common for women to have simple hairstyles (ponytails rule) and very little make-up (Chapstick counts as make-up here! I love it!). In the not-so-deep South, big hair rules, along with tanning-bed skin tones and gallons of make-up. I guess when you don't have to plan on rain 300 days of the year, your style choices are gonna be different. :-)
- Half of the folks were splitting their attention between the miniature televisions on their tables and the big televisions mounted on the walls. Since we don't have TV and rarely eat in restaurants that have it, we always notice when they're so prominently displayed. We also can't help but notice the zombie-like expressions of the people who are so tuned-in to the programming...
- Seattle is often ranked high in best/healthiest places to live. In our three short years living here, we've become accustomed to being surrounded by generally fit and healthy people. Seattites are, as a whole, an active bunch - hiking, kayaking, tri-athleting, soccering, yogaing, jogging, walking, you name it - and it shows! In Kentucky and southern Indiana, it is too hot to do much outdoors, and you have to drive to get anywhere - and it shows. Suffice it to say, this was the kind of place that made us understand why the media is so worked up about the "obesity epidemic".
- Within an hour of our arrival, my eyes started watering and my nose felt prickly as the tell-tale smell of cigarette smoke began to fill the. entire. box. That's when we decided to go outside and get some fresh air. Seattle recently passed a law that not only is smoking prohibited in public venues, but smokers may not even light up within 20 feet of building doorways. This ensures that the rest of us don't have to walk through a cloud of nasty just to get inside a pub, restaurant, library, what have you. I'd forgotten that smoke-free facilities is far from the norm in other (most?) parts of the country. Hack. Cough. Ugh.
So, we felt like the anthropologists until we realized that we were the "outsiders", and had not gone unnoticed! Eyes were following us as we went through the buffet line, up to place bets, out to look at the horses. In the "big city", folks see so many strangers one after the other that it isn't particularly note-worthy. In small-town America, however, strangers stick out, and we were no exception to that rule! After all, we were walking around gleefully watching the goings-on, enjoying the sunshine (but not too much! Check out our Seattle skin. Tee hee!), and talkin' funny so....we stuck out.
The big news of the day was Rob doubling his money! Yay! He placed a big ol' $2 bet, and won. Repeat, lose. Repeat win. He started with $2 and ended up with $4, even after his sad loss. I have to admit, even if our bets were small, it did increase the general excitement of watching those amazing creatures run around a track. We decided to go outside for a race, to get closer to it and feel the horses running by. The thumping of all those hooves going oh-so-fast was amazing! You can feel the reverberation climb up into your bones!
The most exciting moment, though - the moment that caught even the double-TV watchers' eye, was when a horse threw his jockey. They were just trotting over to the gate, it was before a race, and the horse spooked, reared, and bonk! down went the teeny-tiny man on top of him as the horse ran off as fast as it could (which was really, really fast)! Everybody in the box was on their feet, trying to see what had happened. Thankfully the jockey wasn't injured, and the horse ran out of steam after his little freak out, so that was that. It was scary and fascinating and surreal. I was glad that no one was hurt.
P.s. I was born and raised for the first few years of my life in southern Indiana. I went back there for college, and all my extended family live there. While I don't choose to live there myself, I enjoy going back to visit and hold a soft spot for it in my heart. I am fascinated by the variety of people and ways of being in all cultures - particularly the numerous sub-cultures within the American culture. Hence the numerous observations made during this event. While there are many things that differentiate "them" from "us", I believe that at our core we are all the same, and want the same things - good health, to love and be loved, the best for our children, etc. Some of the everyday differences in our ways of doin' things, though, really make me go "hmmmm". Thank goodness for variety!
Comments