Cedar Rapids, don’t lose your identity

By Laura Fuller

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Dubai has everything. The world's tallest building, downhill skiing in the mall - it's a far cry from home, a Middle Eastern cosmopolitan playground.

I'm not homesick when I sweat in the ungodly heat or see Emiratis dressed in Arab garb. I'm homesick when I meet bastardizations of my own culture: Starbucks didn't brew coffee this morning?

Yet, even as I complain, I recognize the greater issue: mistaken cultural hybridity. Why is Starbucks on the Arabian Peninsula in the first place?

It's convenient to not need to speak Arabic, but I question whether that's right. At what cost does the city accommodate my customs above its own?

Loving Dubai is like trying to love someone whose personality depends on his company. Dubai borrows luxuries from everywhere to welcome all open wallets, bleaching its own personality in the process. There are beautiful, authentic glimpses of Middle Eastern culture, but we must sift through American Eagle and the Gap to reach them.

Friends here invited me to their house to help them decorate their artificial tree and bake cookies on Black Friday. It was lovely, but I cried as I rolled out the dough. Something wasn't right.

Christmas tree day at home requires mittens and a drive down Ushers Ferry Road to the Greenbranch Tree Ranch. We've done this every year since my parents moved to Cedar Rapids nearly 30 years ago. It requires candy canes, hot chocolate and a Frasier fir - the stuff of Christmas. I sad-smile at the remembered image of Dad, wearing his Carhartt coat to put lights on the white pines out front. Mom now wears that coat for this task. It all merges and glows: home.

The trip to the Greenbranch is an experience distinctly Cedar Rapidian.

We could easily partake in the Black Friday tradition of buying nondescript things from giant chain stores. But people can do that anywhere, even - gasp - in Dubai.

The Greenbranch will close. Each year, it comes a step closer to being no more. The land is on the market, acres of natural beauty steeped in traditions, likely on its way to becoming an expensive, cookie-cutter neighborhood.

We could do without, say, another mini-mall. To see one go might mean a loss of convenience (or jobs, yet another sad story), but it wouldn't be the type of cultural tragedy that losing the Greenbranch will be. No one will ever move to Cedar Rapids because they love Applebee's. No one feels homesick for Kohl's.

People can feel the city's pulse in such places as the Greenbranch. It's a cultural experience to enjoy your coffee from Witte's End, to wander Little Bohemia.

In June 2008, if Walmart had been washed away, it would have made a wake less substantial than that of the small businesses of downtown. I'll mourn the loss of the Greenbranch because it leaves an opportunity for Cedar Rapids, like Dubai, to drop a piece of itself in order to adopt a non-personality. It is a slippery slope, this mall culture. It brings in cash, but that's not character or a sense of history. Are we really still trying to learn this lesson?

Neither Dubai nor Iowa is for everyone. No place can be for everyone without really being for no one at all.

Cedar Rapids has a unique culture. Let's keep it. It's no shortcoming not to be Dubai, Des Moines or Chicago. The tragedy would be denying the world an unapologetic Cedar Rapids.

Laura Fuller, a Cedar Rapids native and graduate of Xavier High School and Luther College, is in her first year of teaching in Dubai, U.A.E. She posts personal essays at Badd

English.com. Comments: laurabethfuller@gmail.com.