Tag Archives: rumination

Community

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What makes a community? What keeps it together? What do the members have in common?

In the U.S., old towns and neighborhoods in cities were often settled by immigrants of the same country and/or ethnicity. My hometown of Hamburg, New York was primarily German and Polish. In Chicago, of course, there are Chinatown and Greektown, and entire neighborhoods, like towns, of Indians, Mexicans, Asians, etc. In these cases, the residents for the most part have a common language, history, and culture, and many have the same goals — American citizenship and prosperity.

There are also company towns where nearly everyone works for the same employer. When I was involved in a consulting project for Gateway Computer, nearly everyone I talked to in town either worked at Gateway, had a family member who did, or had a business patronized by Gateway employees. The connections here are somewhat more tenuous; while the success of nearly individual depends on the success of the company, and while there area always a lot of family relationships in any town of limited size and growth, the people themselves may not have that much else in common. The residents might include everyone from cleaning staff and security guards to engineers and executives, with different social values, economic standings, and religious beliefs. The community is built based on the company, not on the people.

Now, many have flocked to suburban and master-planned communities, where the attractions are people of the preferred ethnicity (more important than most people will admit), large houses that are increasing in value, good school and services like police and fire, plus attractions like dining and shopping. There may be some common desires and even values, but this type of community may consist of people who have lived in it their entire lives, people who have moved from the city, people who have moved from other suburbs, and even people who have moved from other parts of the country. They may share a national culture, but the local cultures from which they came may be very different. Maybe the town has always rolled up the sidewalks early in the evening, while new arrivals from urban areas are used to lots of excitement and noise late at night. In one case I know of, the local culture is largely centered on hunting and fishing, and new residents from out of state were surprised to see their neighbors in their backyards cleaning their guns and other equipment.

It seems to me that the concept of community is a natural one, while the construct is often not. People need to live in communities to share in services and goods, to form social connections, and provide one another with the safety (and sometimes risk) of numbers. That said, anyone with the means and the desire can live in a community, but no one needs to participate in it. If most of us don’t participate in the community, or know our neighbors, is it a community, or is it just a conglomeration of dwellings?

When the U.S. was a fledgling nation, was there a greater sense of community? At a time when I may have lived miles from my nearest neighbor, with only the horse for distance transportation, would I have relied on him more, to help build my house and barn, plant and harvest my crops, cope with weather and natural disasters like droughts and tornadoes, and fend off enemies? I would have needed my neighbor, and he would have needed me.

Do I need my neighbor, whose house is within feet of mine, in the same way today? I might ask him to watch my house or my pets, plants, and mailbox while I’m away. His children might play with mine, but if they go to different schools they might be more likely to spend their time with their school friends. The only time we might have contact is at community association meetings, where our only exchange might be for one of us to complain about the condition of the other’s lawn. There’s not much sense of belonging to a greater whole or of real service to it, mainly of asserting one’s rights and privileges.

The Wall Street Journal ran a feature about Dallas and the city’s attempt to revitalize its business downtown. The story mentioned a national trend of people buying houses and condos downtown in large cities. Certainly this is true in Chicago, where downtown housing is booming (at boom prices). I wonder if some of the people making this move are seeking a sense of community, where they have a doorman or concierge who knows them by name. I wonder if they are people who want to be able to walk to the grocery and drugstore and encounter neighbors on the sidewalk rather than breeze by them in self-contained, climate-controlled SUVs. Are they pioneers of a sort — people willing to give up the known for the unknown and unfamiliar?

It’s an interesting experiment, and it’s natural to wonder how long it will last. Will these pioneers develop true urban communities, where the people are as important as the trappings? The kind of community Colette writes about in the Claudine novels, where people of disparate backgrounds but similar socioeconomic status pay visits and gather for one another’s “at home days”? What will people find to be the downside — the lack of personal, open, and natural space? Isolation from friends who have not made the move? Lack of neighborhood recreational opportunities for children? Lack of convenient schools? Lack of malls and familiar stores?

Is this a reaction to “cocooning,” when we rented movies and ordered food in, staying home and avoiding our community?

Is it a fad or a trend?

Are we waking up to the sense of community that we may have lost with the advent of the car and suburbia?

For how long?

Edmund Fitzgerald

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October 15 — I was listening to one of my favorite songs from my adolescence, the eerie, haunting “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” I think I’ve always assumed Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 tune was about a shipwreck that had happened long ago, but today I decided to find out more. To my surprise, two of the best sites dedicated to the Fitzgerald have been developed by young people who weren’t yet born in 1975, which I learned is the year in which the Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior, killing all 29 members of her crew.

The first site, S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald Online, has information about the ship, the crew, and the wreck. The second site, 3D Edmund Fitzgerald, features 3D drawings, meticulously detailed and with documentation where details are missing, for example, the hole for the ladder to the crow’s nest. I give these kids a lot of credit for their thoughtful interest in an event that is minor in the scheme of history and that most remember primarily because of Lightfoot’s tribute. Both sites are well done and worth bookmarking.

I won’t get into the details of the Edmund Fitzgerald or the wreck — just visit S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald Online. What the tragedy of the Edmund Fitzgerald reminds me of, though, is what all of us too often forget — the work of those who keep us comfortable and in comfort. The Fitzgerald was carrying iron ore in her hold for the auto industry. Who mined the ore? Who loaded the Fitzgerald? Who would have unloaded her? Who would have hauled the ore to the plant? Who would have processed it? People — people who risk their lives so that we can have heat, food, necessities, comforts, and conveniences. People who may like danger and risk and who are often fatalistic about it. People who work on farms, in mines, in processing plants, in rail yards, in dockyards — and on freighters. How many farmers killed or maimed, miners buried, rail men crushed, how many injured, amputations a testament to the risks of the machine age? How easy it is not to think of the essential work we’ve never seen or experienced, like that performed by stagehands behind the scenes at a theatrical production.

The men of the Edmund Fitzgerald experienced bitter cold, howling winds, and crashing waves — and the knowledge of wrecks that “the gales of November remembered” — November, one of the stormiest and deadliest months for shipping on the Great Lakes.

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and the deaths of all her hands. No one knows what caused the wreck itself. But we do know a great deal about her crew. For the most part, they were seasoned seamen, as well as family men. One had survived Iwo Jima, while another pursued a passion for learning cooking and baking. A couple, including the captain, were looking forward to retirement. They were ordinary men who knew they could die on the job but probably never expected to, or to be memorialized in one of the decade’s hit singles — or online.

When you take a look around you, at your food, at your clothes, at your appliances, at your furniture, at virtually everything you own, remember the men of the Edmund Fitzgerald — and everyone else who, sight unseen, keeps you warm, fed, clothed, and comfortable. They deserve to be recognized for all they are willing to do — and all they are willing to risk.

On this 30th anniversary, take a moment to think about the men who died and their families, and all who die or are injured performing their work.

My frizzy attitude

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Today I went to a neighbourhood salon I hadn’t visited in years. I needed a haircut and was tired of the constant commentary I received at the place I have been going to. Of course, I was assaulted with the usual questions and comments:

How long ago did you get a haircut? [The polite way of saying, When was the last time you had this MESS cut?]

How much do you want taken off?

The ends are pretty dry. It will be at least this much. That okay?

Etc.

Halfway through the cut today, she suggested I consider having my hair cut short. What is this fascination of hair stylists with short hair? Each and every one tells me I should think about getting a short haircut. Well, I’m 44 years old, which I think is old enough now to know what I want and don’t want, and I don’t want a short haircut, which is why I didn’t ask for one.

Today I had to explain why not. I’ve had short haircuts. I look hideous in short haircuts. Short haircuts are a great way to scream, “Look, this woman has an oval face, no neck, and no chin! Look! And a small head on a huge body! Look! There’s no hair to impair your view!” I told her this, in slightly different terms, and she looked at me disapprovingly, silently saying, “I don’t believe you. Everyone secretly desires to have a short, chic haircut, especially women with no chin and no neck. I belong to the secret ‘Women must have short hair’ society,’ and you are foiling our plans for world domination. And you’d look so cute in short hair.” Except I would look (and have looked) terrible in short hair. So — no short hair!

“I don’t really mean short hair; I mean, to here [indicating shoulder length].” And, ta da — she cut my hair to shoulder length, as it turns out. But apparently it’s not short enough to meet the society’s nefarious goals.

Then she asked me if I use “product.” I deduced she meant gel. Yes, I use gel to flatten the bangs that no one will cut short enough and that are forever in my way. “No, I mean on the rest of your hair.” “No. Why?” “Does your hair curl mostly or frizz? Product would help with the frizz.” “I don’t mind frizz.” “But you have such beautiful hair.” Apparently, frizz impairs its “beauty.” Too bad because, as I told her, I really don’t care if it frizzes. No, really. I don’t. Why is this so hard to believe? Do I look vain to you? And is there a gene that make frizz look hideous to the rest of the world? If so, why do so many women spend a gazillion dollars on permanents that look frizzy? So they can achieve what I have naturally. Frizz. Love it or look away. I don’t care.

We got into a discussion over curl, and when it became clear to her I just don’t get it, what she was asking me about how my hair curls, she sighed and said, “You don’t understand. I mean . . .” No, you don’t understand. I don’t care if my hair curls or frizzes. I simply want the split, dry ends cut off. That’s all. A cut. No commentary. No fluffing, drying, gelling, or primping. Just a haircut.

Anyone know a good barber? Maybe he can give me a shave, too.

Deliverance

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I’m reading A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson, and he mentions Clayton, Georgia, and Billy Redden, who appeared in the film adaptation of Deliverance.

I saw Deliverance only a few years ago, when my cousin’s daughter lived in a converted hunting cabin in Pennsylvania. This seemed appropriate a venue from an aesthetic/ambiance viewpoint — somewhat remote (well, in the woods and a bit of an uphill driveway off the road, with a steep hillside looming immediately off the living room picture window, waiting for a hard or a long rain to have an excuse to knock the house down the rest of the hill into the road).

Not being a fan of suspenseful or violent movies, I couldn’t comfortably sit through it without closing my eyes, wandering to the kitchen, the bathroom, etc. This fit in perfectly with the ambiance of the occasion — it was over the Christmas holidays, and my cousin, his wife, his daughter, her husband, his hound dog (a beagle), and miscellaneous other furry friends were ambling among all the rooms in the same manner I was, so I didn’t stick out too much like the proverbial sore thumb, well, except for constantly saying, “I can’t take suspenseful or violent movies, so I can’t watch this . . .” Deliverance was in the VCR because my cousin’s son-in-law had gotten it as a gift.

Like many, I was struck by the boy who appeared to play the banjo in the “Dueling Banjos” scene. “Appeared” because not only could he not play the banjo, but he could not fake playing the banjo; apparently, there’s another kid’s arm in the sleeve faking the playing.

The face that you don’t forget when you see Deliverance belonged to a backward boy of fifteen named Billy Redden, who had the role of a retarded banjo player. The thin-lidded eyes and simple grin are haunting on film, and they were just as disturbing to see on the set.

Summer of Deliverance by Christopher Dickey

A short time later in the movie would appear a woman and child who were equally “disturbing” and underdeveloped. Then there are, of course, the two men who attack the Ned Beatty character.

My gut reaction was to think, “Oh, who would believe this — that this kind of thing existed in 1970s America?” I was a skeptic. I posted my doubts to a mailing list that happened to have a lifelong Georgian on it, and he told me that such people do indeed exist, especially in the northern part of the state, and nothing in the movie was an exaggeration.

I thought back to a young adult book I’d been given years ago named Christy by Catherine Marshall, about a young urban girl, living at perhaps turn of the century or a little after, who is drawn to the Appalachians to serve as a Christian missionary. It’s been years since I read it so I don’t remember details, but Christy is taken aback and unnerved by the poverty, ignorance, and backwardness she sees everywhere. The only person who can really understand her perspective and that of the local people is a Scots doctor who grew up in the area.

There is no such thing as sanitation, so typhoid is rampant. When babies are “tetchy,” the mother shakes them as a “cure” — often resulting in the baby’s death. Trepanning is high-tech surgery. There is an otherworldliness to Christy that is difficult to explain, just as there is an otherworldliness that comes across briefly in Deliverance. The awesome beauty of nature populated by people who are little evolved from ancestors hundreds of years ago — and who clearly suffer the result of generations of inbreeding.

I find this otherworldliness, for all its suffering, brutality, and primitivism, strangely haunting and fascinating. My mind, overwhelmed by urban and suburban sprawl, a mushrooming population, media saturation, the Internet, people and technology and information everywhere until I feel a desperate need to escape at any cost, cannot fathom that there are, or were in the 1970s at least, parts of the country where everything I feel crushed by barely exists.

I would love to see northern Georgia today. Somehow, I suspect I would find satellite and cable/digital TV, an onslaught of advertising, and even a computer or two. I would be disappointed.

You see, Deliverance (and Christy) are trips in time, to a past that we no longer remember or care about, when America was covered in forest and young and brutal and backwards. That time is past, but the snapshot may still be there, and that is surely a wonder.