This has been our home for 41 years. As with the tv series, "Cheers", eveyone knows your name. That's the good news. It's also the bad news.
The name of the town derives from the surname of the original settlers - not a collective state of mind, as some auslanders have implied.
Having said that, the local gentry has been known to suffer occasional fits of intense apathy. Our Sunday Farmers' Market had it's grand opening with a terrific fanfare. Two years later, all the vendors and musicians had folded their canopies and scattered to the four winds. Melodramas at the local grange have suffered the same fate, leaving some delightful damsels and dastardly villains to wonder when the next footlights would be beaming in their direction. Consider also the west-side road sign pictured above, for which truth in advertising was obviously not a primary consideration. It is now shrouded in undergrowth, leaving it to the town's elder statespersons to locate and identify, like some archeological find, for passersby on State Highway 212.
The ultimate statement of dispassion (which, after all, cannot be considered synonymous with "boring") happened when the electorate could not even agree to become a "village", which would have at least granted us territorial independence. As it stands for the present, we could fall prey to Sandy sprawl from the east, or Damascus deluge to the west, and all that is Boring could disappear from the postal service, telephone directory, and county animal control unit data banks.
Despite all that could happen, I think paranoia wouldn't become us inhabitants. Indifference is the virtue that will preserve our identity over all manner of consuming forces. Velveeta cheese will still be found in the gourmet section of the general store. Ten years from now, you might yet be able to score a '51 Packard Clipper hubcap at Grandma's Antiques, and Jeff will continue to greet patrons with "How's it goin'?" when he serves up your double latte at his Espresso Depot, hard by the post office. (He is genuinely interested. The more mundane the answer, the better.) Life goes on at the same uniquely monotonous pace around our wide spot of the highway. We are not a town. We are not a village. "Community" doesn't even fit. We are an aggregation, and one which fondly embraces its vanilla umbrella.
When asked if life is really "boring" in Boring, my patented response to the curious is, "That's what we like the outside world to think." Wink. Wink.
HLR
