The Nerve Center of a Small Town

When I first moved to Maryville, a small town in Northwest Missouri, I asked my department chair where I could take my parents for Sunday breakfast. She said, without hesitation, “Hy-Vee Cafeteria.”  Hy-Vee is the local grocery chain and their cafeteria is nothing fancy. But if you want to get a feel for Maryville, the cafeteria should be your choice for breakfast.

The cafeteria sports vinyl booths with abstract patterns in subdued grey-blue and grey-pink that have become more subdued with wear, and mismatched black chairs at low-maintenance blond tables. Out the plate-glass windows I can see the purple-rose of dawn through the Christmas trees for sale.

At 7:00 AM, a man in a yellow-green safety jacket applies himself to his eggs and coffee. I’m A group of men, some younger with the blue-green colors of the high school, have finished breakfast and say their parting words. The group of farmers, one in a grizzled beard declaring that “I won’t vote for him next year, “ left a few minutes before, as a man in a cowboy hat and a woman with faded orange hair and glasses choose a booth for themselves as the boys’club of six AM shifts to middle-age couples in plaid flannel and sweatshirts and jeans.

In an hour or so, young families will trickle in, some I would recognize from the university, some I'm less likely to recognize from town. Families here live in a different Maryville than I do, one that has Christmas parades and pageants and high school football. Townies live in a different Maryville than I do, one that has tractor parades and benefit dinners and the Live Nativity. My culture lies in fragments across the United States, in coffeehouses, on the cliffs of Starved Rock, in the leche at a bakery in Hermosa Park, in the South Lounge of the Illini Union, in a thunderstorm in the Catskills.

But we all end up in the cafeteria at the local Hy-Vee for breakfast.