My Own Little South Park?

Peachtree City, where I live, is sometimes sarcastically called the Magic Kingdom; I guess because the happiness it provides is supposedly illusionary. Yet, after living here for 6 years, I must argue that the people who call it that must either be jealous, or either they wouldn't recognize a good thing if it bit them on their Mickey Mouse ears. I don't know if other metro Atlanta suburbs are the same, but here in South Fayette County, the spirit of community lives. A fair representation of this concept is my Mailman.

Postal worker reputations sit somewhere between that of The President and Cannibalistic Serial Killers. Post office employees are typically pictured as psychopathic, paranoid and sometimes even politically incorrect. My personal "postal worker," Roger, shows a spirit of friendliness that hearkens back to the days of Gomer not to the present era Homer (Simpson, that is).

Recently I have had a friend helping me paint my house. Each day as Roger delivers the mail, he makes sure to ask us if we are "working hard or hardly working," or some americana-ism like that. In actuality, Roger seems to make eye contact with my pal when he says "working hard?" and he looks at me when he says, "or hardly working?" That kind of fun, familiar disposition saturates the population of Peachtree City.

Though the citizens in my city number too large to expect to recognize the same people at the grocery store or the gas station on each visit, the camaraderie everywhere is the same. It's a safe, warm, almost idealistic feeling. You almost expect to see Wally and the Beaver riding on a golf cart to the Saturday Matinee.

My wife and I were eating at our town's favorite restaurant, Partners Pizza, the other day and my daughter lured me over to play one of those games where the claw reaches down to pickup prizes. To illustrate it's enchantedness, in Peachtree City you can actually win at this. I had won a few stuffed toys but gave up on this particular Raccoon. We went back to our table to eat lunch. A few minutes later, the waitress brings over the Raccoon we failed to crane in and she tells us it was from "Roger the Mailman." Money aside, who out there nowadays would take the time and effort to do something for a relative stranger? Our "postal worker" is who. And alot of others in our city too.

As technology makes the world smaller and closer, our neighborhoods and our communities seem to grow more distant and impersonal. We seem to look for a forest beyond the trees. The recent phenomenon , "South Park" works because its excessive hatefulness is about the only thing that could make our community environments look acceptable.

I'm glad I live at the friendlier end of the spectrum. But, Peachtree City is really nowhere magical; we have the occasional sourpuss. Neither is it the working man and woman's Camelot. Frankly speaking, it's built on top of a swamp...Oops, wetland. Maybe Peachtree City's success comes from an almost accidental little tenet: City construction code, makes it almost impossible to build a fence.

Billy Murphy -- 4/22/98