CityView Magazine

on second thought Now whenever I hear people criticize Fayetteville I invite them to visit us. I know that if they come they will see a city that I, once Fayetteville's most reluctant citizen, am proud to call home. To Fayetteville, With Love A A once-reluctant resident embraces her new hometown | BY MARY ZAHRAN s a way to introduce myself to CityView readers and to contrib- ute to the retrospective theme of this edition, I would like to look back to my arrival in our fair city. But unlike CityView's five-year anniversary, my own anniversary as a citizen of Fayetteville goes back much further — twenty-eight years, to be exact — when I moved here from Raleigh. In August of 1983, my husband, Sam, who is Fayetteville born-and-bred, decid- ed to accept a job here. Not only was he excited about the prospect of a new and challenging professional opportunity, he was also happy to be back in his hometown with his family. At the time, our daughter Anne was almost four, and here she would have lots of cousins for companionship. There was, however, one problem — I didn't want to leave Raleigh, which had become my adopted, and much beloved, hometown. I had lived there for nine years, attending North Carolina State Universi- ty both as an undergraduate and graduate 12 | Anniversary Issue • 2011 student. I met my future husband there; I was married there; our first child was born there. I loved the city — the shopping, the people, the thriving arts community, the restaurants, the rhythm of life — I loved it all. I'm not sure, but I think there may still be claw marks along Highway 401 South where I was dragged, kicking and scream- ing, away from a city I adored to one about which I knew almost nothing, except that it wasn't Raleigh. To say that I was unhappy would be an understatement. It didn't help matters that we moved here during one of the hot- test summers on record into an apartment that had no air conditioning. Fayetteville looked less like the beginning of a new life and more like the start of a long prison sentence. Time passed, and things changed: One of the hottest summers on record was soon replaced by one of the coldest win- ters on record, but at least we had heat and heavy coats. I quickly learned that a person can re- main unhappy for just so long. If my life in Fayetteville was going to flourish, I would have to change my attitude, and I did. I enrolled my daughter in preschool at Snyder Memorial Baptist Church. I be- came friends with other transplants who were also slowly finding their way in a new city. I got a library card and soon discov- ered that Cumberland County had a very good, if strangely situated, public library system. At that time, the fiction and non- fiction collections were housed separately in buildings downtown that were several blocks apart — so much for checking out "Great Expectations" and a biography of Charles Dickens in a single transaction. I discovered that, like Raleigh, Fay- etteville had a vibrant artistic community. The Fort Bragg Playhouse, along with the Fayetteville Little Theatre (now the Cape Fear Regional Theatre), offered first-rate productions for its patrons. Lee Yopp and Bo Thorp brought internationally ac- claimed actors to our town to perform for

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