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Clio's Temple
Clio's Temple
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"The circle time parade of changes" (1)
Posted on June 20, 2017 at 7:03 AM |
This line, from Phil Ochs' "Changes", has
long been one of my favorites in summing up what life's about. Now that I'm
closer to being an old man than a young man, I try to look at my life and see
what's been lasting and what's been impermanent. I suspect that many of us, remembering our childhoods,
might recall a time when we thought our grandparents had always been the same
age as when we first knew them. That may account for the sense of wonder we
sometimes feel when we see pictures of our elders as "youngers." As
we age, as we wrestle with the changes and challenges of life, as we welcome
children and grandchildren to the world, how many of us can truly recapture the
emotions of small children when they meet the elderly? Likewise, I suspect that most of us remember our
hometowns as permanently preserved in the amber of memory. In the rural deep
South where I grew up, my hometown didn't change a lot from the early 50s until
the mid-1970s, when I-10 was built, passing just a couple miles south of town.
In my boyhood, the Victorian railroad station, the downtown commercial blocks,
the churches as I remember them looked a lot like the pictures taken twenty or thirty
years earlier. In the case of my hometown, one passenger train still made a
daily stop there until 1964, after which the depot in the heart of town turned
into a mostly empty monument to better days. The nearest McDonald's was twenty
miles away, and didn't open until 1965. Nowadays, there is a Wal-Mart Supercenter
at the interstate exit, whose square footage is about the same as the whole
downtown shopping district of sixty years ago. It does a disservice to any place to limit ourselves
to surface impressions. Just as every old person was once young, everyone town
in decline was once a town on the rise. In the South, railroads, cash-crop
agriculture, forestry, and industries such as textiles were major agents of
change in the decades after the Civil War. Such is the case for the fictional
north Georgia town of Maxwell, whose sad fate unrolls in the last half of Tangled Woods and Dark Waters. A
railroad and a dam across a creek, built to provide power to a textile mill,
turned a forest primeval into a place that was "home" to several
generations of citizens. The demographic indices of our nation shown an
increasing divergence between major urban centers, their suburbs/exurbs, and the
large swatches of land in between these centers. In the former, there is
progress and prosperity, at least for some; in the latter, there is often a
sense of desperation as economic prospects dwindle. Small wonder, then, that
many people feel disoriented and angry as hometowns once vibrant and
(relatively) comfortable become landscapes of deprivation. I'm afraid the story of Maxwell is repeated across the
length and breadth of our land. This is not a good omen for the future. |
Categories: Fiction and Life
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8:30 PM on July 18, 2018
Do you know what your life is about? That's pretty ambitious.

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10:44 PM on September 12, 2018
How old are you now? I am just curious. You might not tell me about your age if you don't want to.
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