One of the advantages of working as a reporter on a midsize daily paper is that the big questions aren't very big to me. I spend a lot of my time covering small town/city government, which mirrors but does not exactly reflect the big issues.

So, equipped with a moderately priced Mexican cigar, I drove 11 miles to a nearby suburb to cover the meeting of their Board of Selectmen, a body that, in small-town New England, corresponds to a city council.

I was there to record the selectmen's vote on a financial matter of some importance to the town, which I did.

Before that vote, there was other business, including the board's approval of transferring a liquor license that goes with a small grocery/lottery/cigarette/liquor store out by the 1930s-era two-lane state road that runs along the town's north side.

I've been in the place, buying a can of Coke or a bag of chips, a little cheap energy. It's not rundown but it's small, not at all like a big supermarket or a chichi liquor store with aisles of wine segregated by country.

A woman was buying the place, and she approached the board with a relative because she spoke Hindi much better than she spoke English. It didn't take long. She'd paid her fees, the store has never been a problem in town and all the board wanted to know was if she'd seen the "Serve Safe" video they show liquor store owners at the police station. It's a poorly filmed tutorial about not selling liquor to minors.

She hadn't seen it but she promised she would and the board gave her the license on condition that she see the video and the police chief sign off on her paperwork.

The vote was unanimous.

And I thought, skeptic that I am paid to be, that I had seen some little bit of the American story that repeats itself over and over again. I've gone into that store for 20 years, and I remember when it was owned by an accented member of another immigrant group. His kids went to college and have abandoned the seven-day-a-week grind of storekeeping.

Her religion was not discussed by the board, nor her political beliefs, neither was she asked why she wanted to buy a poorly lit store on a two-lane blacktop road. No one asked her if she planned to sell condoms or newspapers with a conservative or a liberal bent. She can sell tracts intended to convert people to Hinduism if she wants. Or Bibles. Her difficulty with English was not an issue either. Everyone knew that she will hire English-speaking clerks if she needs them and everyone knows owning a store is the cheap course to fluency.

It was an engaging little combination of civic equality, free-market capitalism I saw Monday night, there in the old town hall with the box out front into which you may place your tax payments after hours.

And it was a long way from the big issues, or maybe it wasn't.

Sometimes, you can see America clearest from the two-lane roads.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. A collection of Dion's Pulitzer Prize nominated columns, "Between Wealth and Welfare" is available for Kindle at Amazon.com