There was an interesting series earlier this week in The Day (of New London) on the challenges facing the summer home of Eugene O'Neill in remaining economically viable as we approach the second decade of the twenty-first century.
I was teasing with an acquaintance (I have no friends) on how a reader in any small town in New England (and elsewhere, come to think of it) could substitute the name of where they lived and the three part series would, for the most part, ring true.
Attending St Peter's School (sic) in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in the middle Sixties, I was always fascinated to read in American History how Washington's army had slipped out of New York City, at the mouth of the Hudson, under the cover of darkness but fought tooth and nail to hold on to New Brunswick, on the banks of the old Raritan River during the Revolutionary War. New Brunswick then, was like New London, Norwich, Plainfield and a hundred other places you can think of, is now. Plywood windows, people sleeping in entrances, sidewalks rolled up after dark and a variety of other suburban ills, real and/or imagined. (Okay, back then, no crack but lots of other secret sins.)
And all these towns are populated by those who chose to stay but didn't (and still don't) know how to stem the ebb of vitality, and by the ghosts of those who departed, some faithfully and others with a faithless kiss. They have stories of past glories that we, the NFH (not from here), have heard all the years we've lived here and no longer care about. My favorite: on Route 12, in Ledyard is a tired strip mall that everyone calls 'Valities'. It's named for a five and dime from Rhode Island that was there in the 1960's (?) and went under long before my family and I arrived here almost seventeen years ago. No matter, we too, call it Valities. When in Rome, Italy or New York....on a good day, I can almost see the store myself.
Economic development and renewal, I suspect, will be a major theme as the shouting and pointing for national office grows louder as we near November, and that's well and good. We have became a nation of moochers and debtors, almost without thinking about it. It's probably decades late that we start to think about how we pay for what we want and need (always two different words because they are two different notions), and I hope, only better late than never.
One of the concerns I have when we look at the ruins of small towns so many call home, or here, is how we attempt to return to a point in the past that can never come again, and we make that idealized version of what once was the definition of what we wish to be. When I came back through New Brunswick in 1991, getting off the turnpike ('what exit?' Nine, and thanks for asking) and seeing a sign for a Hyatt House Hotel, I thought it was a joke. Nope.
Where there had been a ghost town, there was now a downtown, full of shops and people. I had returned to my roots, but didn't recognize the tree. That didn't and doesn't make it 'bad', and for my children, who've never lived there, and for those whose children grew up there, it's all the town they've ever known. When the past keeps us from seeing a future, we need to shift the present.
No one steps into the same river twice because both the person and the river have changed. And while it's probably healthy to mourn what we miss, getting stuck in someone else's reverie will not help us get to where we want and need to be, either tomorrow or later today. Carpe Diem is only valid when you have a reason and a plan for what to do with the day you've seized.
A life without risk is safe, but not much of a life because a life without risk is a life without the joy of reward and who wants that? Innovation, Invigoration and Invention all begin with "I"-that's probably not a coincidence, but a call to arms.
-bill kenny
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