In this week’s Home Sweet Hometown, Pat Bishop and Mallory Anderson “duel” about life in Omaha, Ne. While Bishop discusses his experiences living there the past six years, Anderson describes a lifetime in Omaha.

Pat

In the year 2002, I moved to Omaha, Ne., a city infamous for being driven through. Even though it’s in Nebraska, it is a real city with people, tall buildings, weird music and cool things. The Eastern side borders the Missouri River and contains the downtown area. It is maintained as a relatively clean and aesthetically pleasing urban environment devoid of the casinos that lie just across the river in Council Bluffs. Many of my friends from high school live on the Eastern side and take part in the music scene and make every attempt to appreciate culture and uniqueness.

I am from the western edge. West Omaha has undergone rapid expansion in the last few decades. Most buildings and houses around me are less than 15 years old. The houses are mass produced on vast plots of land that up until recently were all farmland. Over the course of a year, a grassy field next to my house was transformed into a vast shopping mall complex with a pseudo town square. It was strange to have lived in Omaha for such a brief time and be able to speak with the wisdom and experience of an old man, saying I remembered when “this all used to be fields.”

Mallory

Omaha — “somewhere in the middle of America.” Well, at least the Counting Crows got their geography right. It’s a city of about 400,000, with a metro area population of roughly 700,000. It’s divided into different neighborhoods based on varying age groups and ethnicities. It has been my home for my entire life.

“Geez,” you may be thinking, “this girl is from the middle of nowhere — Nebraska?!” It’s true, the mention of my home state has been known to conjure up amusing, if somewhat stereotypical images of beer-drinking teenage hicks tipping cows on Friday nights. Well folks, I’m here to set the record straight.

Pat
Every restaurant within a 5-mile radius of where I live is part of a national chain. I walk into the Applebee’s down the road and see all sorts of pictures and knick-knacks — some of them vaguely related to local sports teams, but most of them really having no significance to the community at all. What they should have up on their walls are pictures of other chain restaurants. That’s what I think of when I think of my neighborhood. They could even put up a picture of the other Applebee’s three miles down the road.

Many people see restaurant chains as the undesirable product of suburban sprawl — sucking the life out of every town in America. Restaurant chains turn everything into a homogenized, mass-produced copy of a copy where nothing is unique and we’re all mindless consumers eating out of a trough with a light-up sign above it in some sort of post-modern dystopia. And that’s probably true. But in an odd way, the prevalence of chain restaurants instead of especially Omaha-ian restaurants makes Omaha feel more like home to me.

Mallory

Omaha is the proud home of Warren Buffet, Union Pacific and some pretty darn good steak. It’s a place where Husker Nation reigns and where you can still see a tractor drive down a city street. I will admit, my high school is surrounded on all four sides by cornfields, and I may have gone turkey hunting once or twice in my life. But let’s not get too carried away. This isn’t Hicksville, after all. Really.

Omaha is only as “country” as you make it. There are plenty of refurbished warehouses featuring apartments for rent in the historic Old Market shopping district. The city features an airport serving twenty cities nonstop, as well as the Joslyn Art Museum. Omaha is home to Saddle Creek Records (Bright Eyes’ record label), and a brand new concert venue dubbed the Qwest Center, which has hosted the likes of Bon Jovi, Van Halen and Bob Dylan. We may experience cultural trends a little later than the rest of the country, but that doesn’t mean we live like pioneers. While it may not offer the same volume of attractions as some larger cities in the Midwest, it’s a safe place grow up, work and raise a family.

Pat

Some of my fondest childhood memories revolve around national fast food chains: winning a personal pan pizza at Pizza Hut for every three books I read, losing my first baby tooth while eating a original recipe chicken leg from KFC, and getting bit by some kid in the back of the Burger King playground. My life revolved around these places more than any local park or Church or youth recreational center. These are the surroundings that shaped me, and I appreciate them for that.

I don’t think of them as supplanting an authentic community or culture. I think of them as a worthwhile culture within themselves — one that’s so expansive that it forms one of the broadest connections between all of humanity. I bet more people around the world have heard of McDonald’s than of George W. Bush.

But am I really from Omaha? Not according to my roommate who was born and raised there. And for the most part, I agree with her. There are parts of Omaha that I know nothing about. What I’ve said about Omaha as a balanced perspective or even an informed perspective. In a way, I’ve only driven through Omaha myself — seeing what lies just off the main road and nothing further. That seems to be the way I’ve experienced every place I’ve ever lived, so maybe that’s where I’m really from. Maybe one day, I’ll finally find that Applebee’s with pictures of other chain restaurants in it, and I’ll finally feel that warm, nostalgic glow everyone else feels when they see their local sports team’s jersey hung up over their booth.

Mallory

Omaha may be small, but I like to think of it as accessible. I may have attended high school in the middle of cornfields, but it’s nice to feel connected to our country’s few remaining farmers. And while there were many nights in high school when I lamented: “there’s nothing to do in this city,” I am proud to say that I’m from Omaha. It is so much more than “somewhere in the middle of America.”