The door opens with the tinny chime of the well-worn brass bell. A welcome song to all bleary-eyed college students relieved to have arrived and fixated on the illuminated menu board and baskets of hot sweets steps away—seconds from their hands. 

If heaven exists, and I pray every morning and night that it does, I hope it has a little brass bell on the front door. I hope every head turns when that bell rings and we get to make eye contact with a few familiar faces before heading to the front counter, like the one in this donut shop. I hope. 

But, what may just brighten my day is walking down to the park at the end of my street, driving five minutes to our local bookstore or plant shop, and on the way home I’ll pick up a nice pizza at the place where the owner knows us by name. Small towns, baby.

Sure, you can do all this in a big city.

But in a small town, you can move at your pace; you can slow down and look around, enjoy the scenery. You know you’re part of the culture and identity—part of the fabric of the place you live.

So, let’s take a look at a few more things we love about living in a small town.

Even in my early-20s, I had enough self-awareness to recognize all I needed to do was pick up the phone and call Vern so we could be resources for each other or at least cast some hate out of our hearts.

And ya know what?

It never happened.

And that’s a shame.

It’s time for small towns to reclaim their space, to rip the moss from the city walls, to reopen for a new century of connection, community, and commerce, and to build a future for our children and their children we never dreamed possible.

There are few things I’m certain of—though that’s never stopped me from having an opinion—but one of them is this: small towns—yours and mine—are one of the greatest things America has to offer. It’s time we start acting like it. And it’s time we start building, investing, and living like it.

It’s time to celebrate the soul of the small town.

For my entire 35 years on this earth, I’ve known of one place and one place only where my thirsting soul can be satisfied with the sweet cream soda notes of Big Red.

The garage fridge.

The Garage Fridge

Every small town kid knows the garage fridge. Even if you didn’t have one growing up (we didn’t), you knew someone who did and you loved them, even if only for this reason.

For me, it was the garage fridge at my grandfather’s house.

I’d toss off my dirt-odored khaki shorts and t-shirt, throw myself into an icy shower to stave off heat stroke, and rinse the mulch-dust-tan from my face, arms, and legs, and prepare myself for an evening locked in my room with a $2 dinner, a DVD from the library, and my burgundy binder.

My secret.

There it was, waiting for me, even before my hair had dried.

I’d pull it from the bottom desk drawer and read “PRIVATE” scribbled down the side in faded Sharpie.

Opening the cover, my eyes, heavy with the draw of a magnet, lock on the first page, surveying every inch of the curves and details, the uncontested beauty, the round…

His younger brother, Chimps, I would have been able to toss over the fence as though I were The Trunchbull of Dahl’s Matilda, and Chimps one of the hated pupils under my tutelage. I can’t say for sure that Chimps weighs less than Squirrely, but he’s shorter. He’s more compact. Easier to throw. That’s just physics.

This smell, as awful as it was, grew worse as a second sense was introduced to the moment. Rusted metal scraped against ages-old cracked concrete. Like a dental drill hitting an unnumbed molar, the staccato scrape, scrape, scrape, pierced my brain and send bolts of electricity from my ears to my feet by way of my spine and tail bone.

What was Pete doing? What had he killed, cooked to room temperature, and then killed again? What bottle of dead fish had he left atop his hot water heater for months on end, squeezed into a chimichanga, and then microwaved in the garage? What was that?

When we moved to the ‘burbs, I was nervous we wouldn’t have any characters around us. I grew up around town and ‘burb people. Their stories were my stories; their experiences were my own. So, I knew what those characters were like. And I love characters. I need them in my life (at least long enough to scare the life out of me when I’m halfway down to the laundry room). But new ones—I need new characters; people who are unlike anyone I’d ever met.

The day we moved in, everything looked so normal, I was afraid we’d have to go downtown to get our fill of characters.

The feeling an eleven-year-old boy is overcome by when hearing the ding of a mini-mart door opening and the smell of once-warmed pizza and dirty tile floors wafting across his still-baby-fatted face is akin only to the feeling a mother has when holding her child for the first time. I can think of nothing else these two feelings would better match but one another. And, for my money, the mini-mart is the superior of the two experiences because there’s no mucus, meconium, or episiotomies. Well, maybe some. But not enough to complain about!

At some point, Americans decided on a more sterile, passionless, financier-style viewing of small business. No longer was someone’s small business a boon both for the owner and the community where they built the business; now it’s an INVESTMENT. A money-making machine.

Everyone has a moment in their lives that tilts them toward some direction in their lives. There’s a story or an event we witness that—consciously or unconsciously—pulls our interest, our desire, (and often our outrage) in some specific direction.

I believe this was one of those moments for me.

I’ve spent my entire life working with, in, and for small businesses in small communities. I love it.

But what I love most about small businesses is what they provide—jobs.

These guys have been saying for years that AI is NOT like the internet--that it’s MORE disruptive and will change the whole game because of automation and job loss.

Now they’re walking that back (because their PR team is telling them to) by preaching adoption as the only salvation.

I’ve made Tik Toks in the past. When I was spending the bulk of my time helping small business owners and entrepreneurs get access to capital to start, run, and grow their businesses, I made Tik Toks to help explain the lending process, the investment process, and business finance in general. However, after six or eight months of making videos, I realized

Do we need chain restaurants and big box retailers and corporate healthcare systems? Again…I don’t know.

But I know we don’t need them more than we need locally-owned businesses and rural hospitals that curate their care to their patients rather than an algorithm or an ever-increasing ROI.

So, yeah, let the robots starve.