STATE OF MIND

Recently we spent a fine Saturday afternoon in Mount Pleasant. I should specify that it was the Mount Pleasant in North Carolina. It turns out there are dozens of Mount Pleasants all over the country, sometimes more than one in the same state. You can see the appeal. Names can be destiny. Name yourself Mount Pleasant and you’re halfway to pleasantness itself.

The “Mount” part is trickier. I grew up near a Mount Pleasant in south Georgia that was as flat as a shuffleboard table. The North Carolina version doesn’t exactly require hiking poles either. Then again, the Piedmont is known for puffing itself up when it comes to height. One of the reasons Charlotte calls its downtown “uptown” is that there’s a slight rise from the edge of the center city to the main intersection of Trade and Tryon streets. You might not even notice if you’re driving. But it is, technically, “up,” so “uptown” it is. And if Mount Pleasant, out on the eastern edge of Cabarrus County, sits on a patch of relative high ground . . . well, a mountain can be a state of mind.

It’s not far from where we live — less than an hour’s drive — but neither my wife, Alix, nor I had spent time there. Our loss. This time we made it there for a literary festival at the Mount Pleasant library, which is bright and clean and beautiful. It doubles as a rec center. Kids were out on the fields playing baseball, and there was a line at a food truck. It was a busy spot in a busy town.

Not all small towns are like that. You’ve probably taken the back roads through some towns where you wonder if you wandered into the zombie apocalypse. Small towns have been hit hard over the last 50 or 60 years by everything from interstate highways to chain stores to the slow death of local manufacturing. Sometimes all you see is a bunch of boarded-up buildings and a Dollar General. It can make more sense to move, either into the city or out to the country. Sometimes the worst place to be is in between.

But other small towns figure out ways to thrive. Mount Pleasant has a crisp little downtown, old houses in good shape, a distillery housed in an old prison. (They make a bourbon called Conviction.) We met a guy who researches town history, a woman who worked in PR all over the country, and a flock of librarians I would follow into the deep stacks anywhere. Every time we drive through a small town, my wife glances around at the houses and I can see her daydreaming. If Alix likes what she sees, sometimes she’ll say, “What would you think about buying a house and moving somewhere like here?”

She said that about Mount Pleasant.

I grew up in a midsized town — about 30,000 people — and got most of my perspective on small towns from watching TV. For the longest time I thought of small towns as being on either end of a wide range. One end was Mayberry, where almost nothing bad ever happened, except when Aunt Bee made pickles. The other end was Cabot Cove, Maine, where somebody got poisoned, stabbed or shot to death every damn week on Murder, She Wrote. (I still can’t believe nobody figured out that Jessica Fletcher was the most prolific serial killer in human history. None of that happened before she got to town!)

Modern life has flattened a lot of the differences between small towns and everywhere else. Streaming services bring the most obscure movies and shows to anyone with Wi-Fi. Worldwide delivery can put pretty much anything you want on your doorstep by tomorrow morning. A small town might not have a fancy ramen place, but Amazon can send you the ingredients and YouTube can show you the instructions.

The truth, though, is that small towns have never been that different than everywhere else. The settings might be different, but our hearts are the same: We all need to love and be loved, to find pursuits that fulfill us, to grieve when life hands us losses, to reach for something bigger than ourselves.

Those things are true no matter whether you live in a hamlet of 200 or a city of 2 million.

Every person is complicated and so every collection of people is more complicated still. It’s easy to write off a place for thinking or acting a certain way, but remember, that might be a majority, but it’s not a monolith. I’m not sure I could get a two-thirds vote in my own family on any subject except banana pudding. Our love for one another brings us together, but our differences are what makes life interesting.

It took me a long time to learn that you can make your own Mount Pleasant, wherever you are. You can just decide to live on higher ground. You can just decide to be decent to others. You can just decide to make a small town out of your friends and loved ones, even if you live in the middle of the city.

We are not likely to move to the actual Mount Pleasant, even though we enjoyed it. What we hope to do, though, is keep the little bits of it that we brought home with us — the warm feelings, the new friendships, the sense of discovery. I’m sitting here looking at a North Carolina map right now. I’ve been all over this state but there are so many places I still haven’t been. Time to gas up the car.