Degrees of Delaware and Arden time

We are barely in Delaware, but we are here, a few miles over the line. Near the point where the furniture stores and computer stores hover (Really, I bet they cast their shadows into Pennsylvania) and vie for your sales-tax-free spending dollars.

I went to college in Delaware, but I saw that more as college culture. I didn't get a sense of what it meant to live in a different state. So what has changed for us in Delaware besides acquiring the country's ugliest license plate? We thought we were getting away from scrapple, that Lancaster County classic that is revered and hated in equal measure, but apparently scrapple is even a bigger deal in Delaware. They even have a festival devoted to it, though it shares a billing with apples. I have mentioned the beach culture and how, even in Wilmington, the ocean pulls people away from their normally scheduled lives. And don't call it the shore. That's New Jersey.

In Delaware, I have been at events where the governor is in attendance, and he is approachable. When you govern over three counties, as opposed to Pennsylvania's 67, it makes you more available to your constituency. All Delaware politicians are. Everybody has a story about Joe Biden. I am convinced that any Delawarean could call him up today and the call would go through--straight to the man. That's how it works in Delaware. It isn't Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (a Pennsylvanian). In Delaware, you are only one or two degrees removed from another Delawarean. It isn't an island, but until the 1950's and the building of bridges and I95, Delaware was not readily accessible to those who lived outside of it. You had to really want to come here, and you had to really want to leave. It was a bit of an isolated population.

Sometimes, it is hard to figure what cultural differences are Delaware and which are purely Arden. In Arden, we have Arden time. It's a slippery thing, time. In Arden, you tell people you are going to start the procession or the egg hunt at a certain hour.  However, if you actually start it when you say you will, expect a few disappointed children whose parents were operating on that buffer of anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes that fall within Arden definition of on-time. I'm not sure whether to chalk that up to a more relaxed south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-line way of life or to the artist/hippie disdain of rules. Or maybe it is a little of both. Mark and I have acquired more tie-dye shirts than ever before. We are trying to to meld into this new informality. "Trying" is a funny way to say it. Who has to try to be late? It isn't as though we are having to go the other way and fit into stricter codes of conduct. My hair would never stand to be high-society. No sommelier is ever going to look at me and say, "Let's push the expensive wines." This new relaxed way of being fits us, but learning to let go is an art. In letting go of standards of time and of formality, even just a tiny bit, you find out where all your tensions and hang-ups lie. It is a good lesson.