Keeping it real

The reference to Seattle's "Galer Street School" is what first caught my attention.  I live only a couple of blocks from Galer.  But then Galer Street, like most of Seattle's streets, leaps from place to place across the city.  It starts off from Madison Park, hops across the Arboretum into my own neighborhood, and runs up Capitol Hill where it serves as the north boundary of Volunteer Park.  After disappearing into Lake Union, it re-emerges on Queen Anne Hill, and finally ends its long life on the bluffs of Magnolia.

The Galer Street School is, of course, fictional -- a plot device in Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette, reviewed in today's New York Times.  But where could such a school have existed, had it in fact existed?  Not likely in my neighborhood.  Describing itself as "a place where compassion, academics and global connectitude join together to create civic-minded citizens of a sustainable and diverse planet," the school idealogically would more likely find itself perched among the large houses atop Capitol or Queen Anne hills, or perhaps snuggled amongst the leafily liberal avenues of Madison Park.  Except that, in the book, the school finds itself in unseemly proximity to a wholesale seafood distributor -- an unlikely neighbor anywhere Galer touches down to earth.

Admittedly, a bit of the novel's flavor has infected virtually all of us Seattleites, regardless of neighborhood.  Which raises the question in my mind -- how did the honest, hard-working, down to earth Scandinavians of my youth become the oh-so-twee objects of ridicule in an acclaimed "multi-media novel," a novel worthy of 28 column inches of review in America's Newspaper of Record? 

How did we become a city, even in satire, where a school gives not the five traditional letter grades of yesteryear, but three grades worthy of a community where all the kids are above average:  "Surpasses Excellence," "Achieves Excellence," and "Working Toward Excellence."  

Apparently, it's all the fault of Microsoft and Amazon, and their brilliant but disrespectful employees.  Things sure weren't like this when Boeing and the Teamsters ran the town!. 

I haven't read the book, of course, but I suspect that it describes Seattle with the same fidelity as Portlandia depicts our sister city to the south -- exaggerating a bit of the froth emanating from the hip and frothy, suggesting an embarrassing tone that's gradually infecting the rest of us, and yet missing a sense of the real substance of life here in our world of Douglas fir, constant drizzle, and patrons who wear jeans and hiking boots to the Symphony.

Someone needs to write a novel that captures the true spirit of Seattle, captures it in the same way as David Guterson caught it for the rural portions of the state in Snow Falling on Cedars.  But, as a character reportedly exclaims in Semple's novel:  "Grab your crampons because we have an uphill climb."

(Bold face in text.)