VOICES : When the Small Town Meets the Big City : Community: After leaving West Virginia for more cosmopolitan surroundings, one San Gabriel resident seems to have come full circle.

I am from the small town (population: 4,200) of Ravenswood, W. Va., a town whose proud motto is: “Living is Good in Ravenswood.”

As a teen-ager, no one could convince me that living in such a suffocatingly small town was good. It seemed that, at any given moment, all 4,200 residents knew where I was and what I was doing. I was blind to the town’s assets--clean air, friendly people, caring neighbors, low crime--and longed to escape to a big city where no one knew my name or my business. I vowed that I would one day move “as far away as possible.”

In search of the anonymity I craved, I moved to Los Angeles after college graduation. Now, 17 years later, I live in the not-so-small town of San Gabriel where my life includes a husband, a home, an Airedale, and a 4-year-old daughter. Recently I have become aware that this community, 2,500 miles away from Ravenswood, is not unlike the town I tried so desperately to escape.

Our area of San Gabriel is a good old-fashioned “neighborhood,” the kind where neighbors know, care about, and look after one another. Where we feel safe and relatively untouched by crime, violence, and gangs. Where kids of all ages play together on the sidewalks and run between and through the yards as if they own them. Where treehouses are built by kids, not fancy architects. Where neighbors borrow tools from one another and the handy people help out the not-so-handy ones. Where leisurely strolling is just as popular as power walking.

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Walking with my daughter and dog has enabled me to become acquainted with neighbors in a five-block radius. In the days when my husband and I were childless and petless, we estimated that the chance of starting a conversation with a stranger was about 25%. With a dog by my side, the chances increased to 75%. And when we added Cynthia to our family, the chances increased to almost 100%.

During a recent walk, one neighbor popped out of his home with coupons he had clipped for us, another offered homemade cookies, and a third eagerly shared her movie recommendation. These gestures, like cool rain on a sizzling day, refresh and energize me and I can’t help thinking, “Life is good in our neighborhood.”

I recently asked our neighbor Mike for help with some electrical problems. We insisted on paying him for his work but he refused the check and reminded me, “We are neighbors and that is what neighbors do--help one another whenever we can.” At one time, I would have thought this neighborly notion was true only in Ravenswood.

Despite the similarities in the two neighborhoods, there are glaring differences, differences for which I am grateful. My Tokyo-born mother was, and still is, one of the few non-Caucasian residents of Ravenswood. When I visit the old neighborhood with our daughter Cynthia, who is of Mexican descent, people react as though they have never before seen a black-haired little girl. One lady exclaimed, “Why, she looks like a little Indian girl.” In our ethnically diverse San Gabriel neighborhood, she draws little attention. Our block includes people of Mexican, Chinese, Philippine and Indian descent, immigrants from Yugoslavia, and at least five Japanese families.

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Our family has especially enjoyed the mutual sharing of culture, customs and cuisine with our Japanese neighbors. I have had the pleasure of introducing our Japanese neighbors to such exotic treats as baked potatoes, Rice Krispies treats, pot roast, scalloped potatoes and tortilla chips and salsa. They have shared Japanese delicacies such as sesame tofu with miso (soybean) paste, batter-fried octopus, Japanese fish stew, cold buckwheat noodles and Japanese eggplant. As an added benefit, we are able to buy fresh fish from a Japanese-American man who visits our neighborhood weekly.

Less than one mile south of our home is Las Tunas Boulevard, a street that boasts cuisines of China, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Mexico, Germany, Italy, Armenia and America. Most of the foods are authentic, delicious, and inexpensive. Ravenswood residents, on the other hand, can choose Italian food (Pizza Hut or Domino’s) or American food, primarily fast food.

Cultural activities in Ravenswood are limited to the movies and plays put on by the local high school. In sharp contrast, our 4-year-old Cynthia has enjoyed a summer filled with weekly trips to the Hollywood Bowl, art classes at the Pasadena Armory, visits to the Huntington Gardens, the Arboretum, the Los Angeles Zoo, Kidspace Museum, the Natural History Museum, the La Brea tar pits and the circus. She enjoyed a special reading of “The Secret Garden” at the Arboretum and attended the play at the Pasadena Civic Center.

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Cynthia and I just returned home from a visit to Ravenswood. As Cynthia, a neighbor and I strolled the streets of Ravenswood one evening, a lady yelled to us from her porch, “My ninth grandson was just born! Got enough for a baseball team now!” Another lady came out to show off her latest craft project. A third inquired about my mother’s health. Surrounded by these warm, friendly people in a town surrounded by green, rolling hills, I was at last willing to acknowledge, “Living is good in Ravenswood.”

But, in spite of the revelation, I soon became homesick for my own friendly neighborhood and the big-city stimulation and diversity Cynthia and I have grown to love.

John Denver may have been referring to West Virginia when he wrote, “Take me home . . . to the place I belong,” but for me that place is no longer in West Virginia, it’s right here in California.