Village life
The pre-dawn air was like the first bite into an early McIntosh, sweet, tart and refreshing. Standing on my porch in the dark, I heard geese, honking their fall call to southern living as they made their way from summer to winter along trails imprinted in them as goslings. The sun would not be up for another half an hour as I made my way down South Street. Marcellus was a different place in early morning, the side streets busy with departures to work and Main Street a bustling thoroughfare.
As I worked through my physical therapy appointment in the building where I once bought my washing machine. later purchased flowers and candy and still later rented videos, the picture of the village as an organism that changed through time, not only the daily rhythms of a place but the evolution through the years, came into focus. The village is not the same one that I knew as a young teacher. Gone is the 5 & 10, the dress shop, Orr’s hardware, Bill’s Books, the barber in the Odd Fellows Hall, the two nursing homes, the original Alvord House. As the years have flown by, and they seem to pass so much quicker as you age, the anchoring memories of the past disappear with each day.
I wondered how the village pulses each day; how different combinations of people, jobs, traffic and such make up the life at any hour?As a person with a love of history, which is in its essence simply passing on stories of what was, it seems that we forget the ebb and flow of life that makes for the ethos of a place and its people. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Plans are made over a cup of coffee, a chance meeting, a renewed acquaintance. Who remembers now, the houses where unmarried teachers lived? Where kids bought penny candy, when milk was delivered to our homes? Each of these memories is an expression of a cultural eddy in time. How many remember the time when there were two food markets in the village? Or when you could buy good hand cut meat from a butcher? Most of the retail life of Marcellus has moved, as it has for many villages, to shopping malls where the interaction between purchaser and seller is impersonal, where the only connection between the two is the material goods in question. Not so when we knew the person behind or next to the counter, often times a neighbor.
Even in cities, the concept of neighborhood, where people know one another, where one’s behavior is visibly connected to yourself, where you are responsible for your actions to your own conscience and to that neighbor, has often been lost.
Like so many caught in the frightening grips of the financial problems of our country, I also wonder if this monetary malaise isn’t indicative of the anonymity of such transactions. The sub-prime mortgages, the spooky “derivatives” and such were transactions made between institutions and people. The institutions in question were represented by employees whose goals were linked to the bottom line, to the sale. There was no personal signature, no connection or responsibility to one’s work and the customer except in the sense of the materials exchanged.
Place is not simply geography, it is an expression of the lives of those who inhabit therein. It takes its life, its tenor, its success from the interaction of those who live there. It is us.
Cities change, villages change, the ebb and flow of people and their interactions is mediated by those changes. While we are held hostage by decisions made by huge corporations and municipalities about where we will shop and how we will be treated, we still have choice.
I still shop, when I can, locally. I feel more at home transacting business with people I can get to know, who share the experiences of life in our village. This is the way a community is built. There is an unspoken belief in the quality of the transactions when both sides are known to each other as persons. Dollars and cents wise, yes, it may cost a bit more. In value? There is no comparison.
What we get out of life is largely determined by how we arrange to deal with the opportunities presented to us and getting up on a darkened early morn to breathe in the crisp air of the village as I keep my 7 a.m. appointment is one way I have of dealing, of making the best out of all of the options that I’ve been given.