Persistence of Memory

I was at my mechanic’s shop to have the rear brakes replaced on my “new” car.  Well, long story short, getting replacement parts from Toyota was going to take longer than expected so I couldn’t wait around.  I called Camera Girl for a lift home.  While I was waiting for her, I started reading some of the stuff he had on the walls of the shop.  There were photos of the cars the shop was selling and the first one was from 1930.  That’s ninety-six years ago.  And the place has had the same last name all this time.  Now Steve looks to be about my age.  That means his grandfather was probably about thirty years old in 1930 (in that ballpark).  Looking at those photos and illustrations from the 1930s was interesting.  His grandfather and probably his father and maybe his uncles have been working at this business for generations.  That would explain why he seems unflappable with respect to mechanical problems.  You probably see almost everything when you’ve been working around cars your whole life.

And here was this company in a tiny town in southern New England lasting for generations and serving a community that know each other from birth to death and beyond.  And that got me thinking of where I came from.  The Brooklyn neighborhood where I was born was just as solid to my eyes when I was young.  The people had been there for generations.  They had their traditions and institutions and a sense of community.  There was a feeling of permanence.  But that was an illusion.  All it took to annihilate that illusion was crime and poverty.  And over the course of time that entire neighborhood disappeared without a trace.  I’ve been back there, mostly for funerals.  And that’s the funny thing.  The Catholic church is still there although it has all the masses in Spanish now.  So, the old people come back for their funerals and then they’re driven out to be buried in Long Island.  And then their children and grandchildren disperse back to the four corners of the Earth.

So that’s the difference.  New England still has towns and those towns still have families that live here for generations.  Maybe not everyone stays put.  But enough so that you can feel like you come from a place that isn’t just going to blow away when the wind shifts.  And I think that’s actually something worth having.  We’ve been programmed to believe that we can drift across the continent finding work where it happens to be and move our kids and expect that everything will be like it was when we were kids.  But I don’t think it works that way.  You don’t have traditions without permanence and you don’t have a neighborhood when you don’t even know who your neighbors are.  And if you only see your family at weddings and (worse) at funerals, then how quickly will family become strangers?  Well just something I thought about while waiting for a ride.