-by Sassafras

Recently, at a college "Cultural Sensitivity Seminar", I was forced to think about the culture from which I hail. The student body at my school has the highest minority population of any private college in the state, so the group I was with in this seminar reflected that. As we went around the room, each of us asked to speak about the culture we called home; I listened to my few caucasian classmates dissemble and mumble through their turns. "I'm white. I have no culture," one women said without a shred of irony. When I came to my turn I stated my facts: I am a Midwesterner. I am an Eastern-European Catholic mixed pedigree, but I am mostly a Midwesterner.

The fact that I identify so strongly with being a Midwesterner above all else doesn't need much explanation. I was born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago. I went to college in Iowa. I have never lived anywhere but the Midwest. And, true to that upbringing, if I can't see the horizon I am lost. I tell direction with North, South, East and West rather than landmarks. I have a couch, not a sofa. I take out the garbage, not the rubbish. I drink pop, not soda, and at the grocery store my purchases are placed in bags, not sacks. These are the trappings of my Midwestern heritage.

For me, to be a Midwesterner means I am not an Easterner, as my parents are. They are both displaced Pittsburgh natives, and twenty years after leaving Pennsylvania for the broad flat plains of the Prairie States, they still consider themselves Easterners. While I was growing up, I knew that they were different than my friends' parents. They lacked the broad, flat Midwestern twang in their vowels. They would drive forty miles for a good bagel in the days before Einstein Brother's Bagels were on every corner. They were chilly with store clerks and had a general "mind your own business" attitude wafting around them like perfume. Other parents would gossip at school functions, asking personal questions with benevolent farmer's daughters' smiles on their faces, and my parents would look uncomfortable. They would squirm under the scrutiny of these friendly, open Midwesterners who had no idea how they were crossing into forbidden territory. In Pittsburgh, the most intimate question you were allowed to ask was, "What parish are you from?" This answered all pertinent questions anyway, and you could avoid a lot of other awkwardness by sticking to the formula.

In choosing to transplant themselves in Chicago in the Seventies, they chose to remove themselves from the large family in Pittsburgh and the traditions that family was steeped in. I never learned to swear in Polish from my Great Aunt Stusha, like my peer cousins did. I missed growing up in the commune-like atmosphere of the Anderson Road clutch of houses where uncles, aunts, cousins, and godparents made their homes, and where the children would run from house to house at dinner time to see who was making the best meal. My parents would tell me stories about this other world of strange Polish/Catholic practices, like having the doors blessed and huge pierogie-making parties that lasted all day, or until the gossip ran out.

The three of us ate quietly together in our little house in suburban Glen Ellyn. There was no yelling in broken English and no strange dishes with unpronounceable names. Though my parents are both third-generation American citizens, the place they came from seems to be one out of time. I saw little bits of this other world when I went to visit my grandparents on summer vacation, and it was just enough to grasp how very different my life would have been if I was an Easterner.

It was as an undergrad that I really began to feel my Midwestern heritage. College is a place where young people's eyes are opened to many things. For the first time, many people are thrown together with people who are not exactly like themselves. There are only so many times that one can hear an Easterner complain about how nice all of the Midwesterners are before you start to examine what that really means. I had no idea what the problem was. What's wrong with being nice? But I soon figured out that they mean "nice with no edge". I don't think that is what Midwesterners are, but the nice is fairly deeply bred in us, and it can take a while to get to the edge. Just try and tell a Midwesterner that New York is the center of the world and the edge will fairly leap out at you.

We are nice. We are friendly. We have open faces, and people stop and ask us for directions or tell us their life stories, apropos of nothing, on city buses. We tell others, apropos of the same, that our Great Aunt Myrtle just died and she loved fishing. There were other characteristics that I was noticed and became proud of after that initial revelation. The Midwestern work ethic is not to be dismissed lightly. The need to account for time spent in a useful way is a very Midwestern quality. This trait makes us more likely to read for pleasure, as reading is an improving way to spend your time. We make as much use of our broad, flat terrain as those who live in the mountains. Avid bikers, hikers, campers, and even skiers, we are not daunted by the lack of height and depth of the land. We make up for it in distance.

The beauty of Midwestern pride is that it allows me to feel part of a community. So, as I was sitting there in my "Cultural Sensitivity Seminar," I thought of how most of the others in the room, whatever their race or ethnicity, were also Midwesterners, and this was something that we all had in common. I spoke about my parents heritage from Pittsburgh and how I felt the same kind of roots from Chicago. Even the Chicago suburbs, land of white bread and minivans, has culture. I am a Midwesterner. I am nice and open and I get lost in hills. I loved "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and "Hoosiers" because they were about my Midwestern experience. I cheer for the Iowa Hawkeyes and the Chicago Bears and anyone playing the Green Bay Packers. I understand the fierce and complex rivalry between Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana.

As I went through my seemingly endless litany of why I was proud of my Cultural Midwestern heritage, I started to get smiles and nods from the people around me. It seemed that I was making sense and touching a nerve in my audience. I don't know if anyone but me walked away from the seminar feeling better. I know that my parents raised me to be proud of who I was, and now that I had found a group to identify with, it was more fun in a way. We all like groups. While I was a member of a huge extended family, I have never felt like it. And though I am told I am Polish Catholic, you couldn't prove it. I am a Midwesterner and that is enough for me.