Surprising Suffolk

Suffolk, Virginia is a city on the rebound. She is now proudly referenced as a city by this author after being officially titled as such for 35 years. However, it was not until my most recent return to the place of my birth that I felt necessary to refer to it as such. Main Street is lined with bright restored homes, the leisurely lunch break wanderers and the occasional shopper. Most of the the bustle comes from the roofs overhead where the city's facelift continues on countless structures left hollow by years of misuse. As George Clooney once declared in the final scene of Oh, Brother Where Art Thou?, "Yessir, we are indeed heading into a veritable age of reason". Such praise might be a little lofty at this stage in development so I instead defer to my dear brother in describing Suffolk's progress. One morning when I picked up that morning's Suffolk News Herald I discovered that he had penned over the front page, which declared the erection of our new Wal-Mart Supercenter, the phrase "Livin' in the Future!" While our city is not started running on solar panels and electric cars we have encountered the future by embracing the past. Finally, the powers-that-be have realized that Surprising Suffolk will never be the new frontier of culture and trippy internet cafes. We as a people have come to realize what we are, simpletons. Yes, I include myself in that accurate estimation of 80,00 individuals. We are The Moose where my grandfather and dad have a table and names, we are Baron's Pub where the last ten years of my high school's alumni gathers to drink away the dramatized boredom of our fair city and we are the Annual PEanut Fest that once won a legal battle against the Dixie Chicks because the Chicks became famous and refused to play at such a redneck, two bit festival in a long forgotten town. Yes, the Dixie Chicks are our bitches, and I am here to tell you why.

In Suffolk, winning isn't everything, yet it is at the same time. Also, everyone knows and shares the gleeful news when you are losing. The seedy details make Blue Velvet feel like a warm down blanket you would snuggle up with at night. Although they are tiny seedy details, they are strewn about like the soy seeds which fuel this blessed agricultural economy. In the minds and mouths of our citizens these seeds blossom into rows upon rows of stories that you can could drive past for hours without ever leaving the sprawling city limits.