Getting wet in cities past, cities present.

Why am I the only asshole in a raincoat? I shouldn't have been surprised; it was always that way. Before I leave the apartment in the morning, I'll listen out the front window. That morning, the wind was whipping around and the rain was coming down hard, so before stepping outside, I slipped into my raincoat. I don't like umbrellas?I don't even own an umbrella?so the raincoat's my only option unless I want to use a garbage bag.

I got down to the subway dripping and off-kilter after tapping my way up the street, only to find that not only was I the only one wearing a raincoat?I was the only one who was even wet.

I still can't figure that out, but it seems to happen every goddamn time it rains. I'm left standing there in my raincoat, sweating and damp, surrounded by perfectly dry people in short sleeves and dresses.

Maybe it's another one of those cultural things, I thought.

Only now, after living in Brooklyn for more than a dozen years, and living on the East Coast for nearly 20, am I coming to recognize some of the very peculiar cultural differences between the East and the Midwest. At least the Midwest I grew up in. It seems banal when you hear it expressed that way, but I'm not talking about the typical "we call 'em subs, they call 'em hoagies" spiel.

It's something that's come up in conversation with Morgan these past few weeks. She was amazed to learn that when I was in school, it was simply a given that half the students would take the first week of deer season off every year to go hunting. It was no big deal, and nobody said a word about it; that was simply the way things worked in Northeastern Wisconsin. There were certain priorities.

Until I mentioned it to her, it never occurred to me that such a thing might seem strange to anybody else.

On the flip side, it wasn't until I was living in Philly that I saw a pair of sneakers dangling from a telephone wire. It was after work one day, and I was waiting for a trolley in West Philly when my eyes drifted upwards to find a pair of Nikes swinging some 20 feet above my head. I still haven't quite figured that business out, but I'm no longer astonished by it the way I was that first time.

I never rode in a taxi until I lived in Chicago. It wasn't until after I graduated from high school that I realized there even were taxis in Green Bay. They simply weren't necessary, as most everyone from the age of 16 had their own car. As it happens, I would learn, there were approximately three taxis in Green Bay. Not taxi companies, but taxis, and they could most readily be found parked near the little cinderblock Greyhound station downtown.

As far as driving was concerned, a completely different set of rules governed the roads. Although everyone still knew how to use turn signals, the turns themselves were quite unlike anything I've encountered anyplace else. After signaling a right turn, the law apparently stated that you needed to veer hard to the left before whipping the wheel around to the right, as if you were trying to avoid some obstacle in the road. Everybody does this. It's not taught that way?it just seems to happen. It's come to be known as "the Green Bay turn."

But like I said, at least we used our turn signals.

There weren't any street vendors of any kind in Green Bay, either. No hot dog or coffee carts, no newsstands and certainly no guys selling bootleg CDs off filthy pink blankets. This was probably due to the fact that sidewalk foot traffic was so minimal.

Speaking of street vendors, soft pretzels were completely unheard of in the area until the shopping mall opened downtown in the late 70s. There was a tiny "Hot Sam" franchise that single-handedly introduced the soft pretzel to the discerning palates of the locals. I remember being quite smitten and fascinated with them at first. Then, after those first three or four, kind of bored.

There are two staples in the local diet that, to my knowledge, are indigenous to the area. At least the rituals surrounding them are.

Given the predominantly Catholic population, the "Fish on Friday" rule was widely followed. And given their availability in local waters, perch became the fish of choice. If the weather's nice, most free-standing bars (of which there are quite a few) would set up picnic tables in the back yard (near the softball field), roll out the 55-gallon drums and hold a "Perch Fry." The resulting deep-fried perch fillets were to be eaten with the fingers off paper plates, and washed down with copious amounts of beer. During winter, everything moves inside. It's a weekly tradition for thousands of families.

The 55-gallon drums come out again whenever booyah's called for (which is usually whenever the fried perch is called for). I realize that "booyah" is an exclamation in most of the country, but not where I come from. Booyah, a variation of an old Belgian stew, is much like gumbo, but it's chicken-based. Instead of chopping things up and removing the bones, however, sometimes whole chickens are dumped into the pot. It's not uncommon to find feet, beaks?even feathers?in your bowl of booyah. This may help explain why it never really caught on big anyplace else.

(Only rarely, by the way, are the above dishes prepared for groups of less than 50.)

It wasn't until Brooklyn that I encountered Korean greengrocers, and I was shocked to find myself in a liquor store that required I ask the man behind the bullet-proof glass to retrieve what I wanted. It was also in Brooklyn that I first learned the importance of keeping boxes of cereal in the refrigerator. Of all the things I've told my parents over the years about living here, that's the one they can't get over.

One of the finest quality of life initiatives I've ever encountered in any city stayed behind in Wisconsin?sidewalk snowplows.

These were almost identical to your regular street snowplows, except that they were much, much smaller?the width of a sidewalk, to be exact, and they worked like a charm. They'd appear after any heavy snowfall and roll up and down the sidewalks, scraping them clean, thus saving homeowners (and me) that extra effort of shoveling up to the neighbor's driveway. The downside to these machines, of course, was that if you were trudging home from school and one of these things appeared behind you (which happened a lot), you were doomed. The only alternative to being run down was to dive headfirst into the nearest snowbank until it passed. Still, I thought they were a great innovation?and why we don't have a few of those here where people actually use the sidewalks is far and beyond me.

Although we were well past the Cold War-era "duck-and-cover" drills, we did have regular tornado drills. We even had a weekly test (noon Wednesday) of the tornado siren. Tornado drills, for those unfamiliar, were pretty much the same thing as the old bomb drills, except that instead of ducking under your desk, you filed out into the hallway with the rest of the class, sat on the floor and put your head between your knees.

(Had to do that during a real tornado once in fourth grade, and I'm pleased to report that we all got out of there alive.)

There was one Jewish family in Green Bay that I was aware of (the Glickmans, who ran the bakery down the street); one Asian family (the Lees, who operated the town's one Chinese restaurant?Lee's); and any black family, it was assumed (generally with some accuracy), was connected with the Packers. As a result, most of the bigotry in town?and there was a lot of it?was aimed at the Poles and the Norwegians. I don't recall hearing about any "anti-Pole" bias attacks, but there sure were a lot of jokes about them. Things have since changed considerably.

It was not uncommon to see a fellow student strolling down a school hallway cradling a rifle or a shotgun under his arm. Nobody ever got hurt?if they had, the student with the gun wouldn't have received his or her gun safety certification. Gun safety was a popular after-school class as well as a necessary requirement for getting your hunting license.

None of this seemed strange to me at all?but then again, why would it? It was all I knew. Or perhaps I simply wasn't that observant?I had books, television and the movies, after all, to show me how things were done in other parts of the world. But to be honest, the things I saw and read more often than not made me appreciate the tiny world I was living in. At least for a little while. A kid in a school hallway with a rifle was nothing. It was just a kid on his way to gun safety class. (Mr. Farrell taught that. There are pictures of him in the yearbook, standing in front of class, holding a gun.)

And then there was that raincoat business, but I'd rather not get into that.