CityView Magazine

10 | September/October 2015 Musing in black and white does wonders for my soul. The financial reward, though, does not even cover the tab for the Father's Day gifts lovingly charged to my account. Thankfully, the conversation on "community" happened during a walk-through prior to the next day's real estate closing (which is how McFadyen bills really get paid). My counterpart was a military wife. She had been in town a couple of years. Her family was headed to Fort Drum. McFadyen's Musings BY BILL MCFADYEN Exiting the Beltline H ers was a significantly dif- ferent perspective from mine, as I was born in Highsmith Rainey Hospi- tal and I have only lived elsewhere for four college years and two post-gradu- ate years of independent study in Maui. I am a local. Fayetteville is easy for me. Many of you struggle to assimilate into this community. We shared the view that Fayetteville can be a tough place for that. She opined that actually this is a small town of people some- what like me surrounded by 200,000 people much like her. ey are committed to being here only for a little while. I lik- ened the scenario to an imagi- nary beltline around a city. ere are lots of places to get onto and off of the freeway, but there is always the hustled congestion of traffic driving round and round and round. Much of that traffic comes here and leaves here as a result of orders from the Commander in Chief. Oen times that traffic whirls around Fayetteville for about two years and the people in those vehicles spend the whole time thinking how none of the exits lead to anything that makes it worth getting off the beltline. So for a couple of years, families like hers just drive. en there are the ones like her who managed to find a way into some com- patible neighbor- hood with people who reached out and welcomed at the same time her family made efforts to as- simi- late. She told me of how they hated to leave now and of how she always saw people she knew at the grocery store or the Mexican restaurant. She lamented missing the upcoming year's Halloween block party, especially given the frigidity of upstate New York. She and I were on opposite ends of a real es- tate transaction, but we had something very important in common. We both considered Fayetteville "home". A true sense of community, one that offers salient comfort and meaningful interaction to its inhabitants, is primar- ily found in small groups. It seems to me that only in times of great tragedy is there enough emotional impact to cre- ate a vast oneness of community. I think of the national unity that followed the destruction of the Twin Towers as my best example. I still see the space shut- tle disintegrating with Sally Ride on board and the collective mourning and compassion that followed. I study Pearl Harbor and the resultant history-mak- ing oneness that became e Greatest Generation's fight and victory over evil. ose types of events create a sense of multi-million-man-togetherness. e rest of the time, it seems "community" is found in tighter clusters. I was a star student for 12 years in the Fayetteville Public School system, scoring pretty well on my SATS and do- ing enough things right that a respect- ed college extended their invitation. I knew three people out of 1,400 when I arrived. On the first day of class, Dr. Bruce "Smiling F" Jackson welcomed me into his calculus class. He was the sweetest man. For better or worse, my last math teacher at Terry Sanford High School was one beautifully feminine thing. Confessionally, I spent more time looking at her write the problems on the board than I did trying to follow the thought-process of the logistics of the trigonometry. Dr. Jackson exuded no similar physical allure. So in his class, I was pretty darned focused on calculus. I never worked harder in school than in that first quarter of my freshman year, trying to calculate, both in class and in special aernoon study sessions with Dr. J. Sadly, and to the great detriment of my overall GPA, I learned first-hand how "Smiling F" got his nickname. He smiled as sweetly as Nanna's pecan pie when I begged for a D despite my 69.4 average, post-exam. at F sat with us

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