My personal Dayton home is in the suburb of Kettering so I’m fairly close to my parents’ farm while within easy driving distance to the malls and convention center of downtown Dayton. When in my early twenties, I decided to move out of my parents’ house and into my own rented apartment. It’s not that I disliked my parents. Frankly, they are my best friends; I love them intensely. Still, I need to have my space so that I can live my own life without having to explain things to them.
You can imagine that at my age I am interested in dating. I really want to date girls from the city since their interests are somewhat different than the interests of girls from the hometown farming community where I grew up. Since I live in Kettering, I can let them know that I am among the Dayton singles. I need not express that I grew up more than twenty miles outside of the city. Many of the Dayton singles types seem to think of farm people as less important than urban dwellers. Living in Kettering takes some of the stigma away from my past on the farm.
I learned about this stigma when I first began dating girls from Dayton. All of the girls were from Dayton or one of the suburbs. They all had personal Dayton addresses. This did not impress me at first. However, it did not take long to sense that my farming community address was considered as less honorable to the girls. None of them wanted to be dating a farm boy. That is when I began shopping for a place of my own so I could have something more acceptable, a personal Dayton area home address.
After a while, my parents seemed to realize that my farm background was hindering my social life. If they resented my decision to move to a suburb of the city, it was not apparent to me. They helped me to find some cheap furniture and even offered to use their farm pickup truck to help me move. I made up an excuse, however, and told them that I had already rented a truck. A week or so after I moved, they drove their Chevy car to visit me and bring me some fresh vegetables from their garden. No rusty old farmer’s truck parked in front of my apartment. I think they rather well understood my feelings.
Now that I live in Kettering, girls seem more willing to date me than when I had the address of the farming community. A guy with a personal Dayton address seems to be important to them. Maybe this is a bit trivial, though. Why should the location of my home be of so much consequence? Still, this is the price that I must pay in order to have the Dayton girls thinking more highly of me.
Am I ashamed of my heritage, my boyhood on the farm? It was a good life, and I learned so much about nature, my family, myself and the values of honest working people. I do not intend to become a farmer. I am not ashamed of my past, but I think that I am somewhat embarrassed to be classed as a farm boy. Probably, I am somewhat vain. I hope I can outgrow that quality.