I was at my mechanic\u2019s shop to have the rear brakes replaced on my \u201cnew\u201d car.\u00a0 Well, long story short, getting replacement parts from Toyota was going to take longer than expected so I couldn\u2019t wait around.\u00a0 I called Camera Girl for a lift home.\u00a0 While I was waiting for her, I started reading some of the stuff he had on the walls of the shop.\u00a0 There were photos of the cars the shop was selling and the first one was from 1930.\u00a0 That\u2019s ninety-six years ago.\u00a0 And the place has had the same last name all this time.\u00a0 Now Steve looks to be about my age.\u00a0 That means his grandfather was probably about thirty years old in 1930 (in that ballpark).\u00a0 Looking at those photos and illustrations from the 1930s was interesting.\u00a0 His grandfather and probably his father and maybe his uncles have been working at this business for generations.\u00a0 That would explain why he seems unflappable with respect to mechanical problems.\u00a0 You probably see almost everything when you\u2019ve been working around cars your whole life.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 And that got me thinking of where I came from.\u00a0 The Brooklyn neighborhood where I was born was just as solid to my eyes when I was young.\u00a0 The people had been there for generations.\u00a0 They had their traditions and institutions and a sense of community.\u00a0 There was a feeling of permanence.\u00a0 But that was an illusion.\u00a0 All it took to annihilate that illusion was crime and poverty.\u00a0 And over the course of time that entire neighborhood disappeared without a trace.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been back there, mostly for funerals.\u00a0 And that\u2019s the funny thing.\u00a0 The Catholic church is still there although it has all the masses in Spanish now.\u00a0 So, the old people come back for their funerals and then they\u2019re driven out to be buried in Long Island.\u00a0 And then their children and grandchildren disperse back to the four corners of the Earth.<\/p>\n
So that\u2019s the difference.\u00a0 New England still has towns and those towns still have families that live here for generations.\u00a0 Maybe not everyone stays put.\u00a0 But enough so that you can feel like you come from a place that isn\u2019t just going to blow away when the wind shifts.\u00a0 And I think that\u2019s actually something worth having.\u00a0 We\u2019ve 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.\u00a0 But I don\u2019t think it works that way.\u00a0 You don\u2019t have traditions without permanence and you don\u2019t have a neighborhood when you don\u2019t even know who your neighbors are.\u00a0 And if you only see your family at weddings and (worse) at funerals, then how quickly will family become strangers?\u00a0 Well just something I thought about while waiting for a ride.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was at my mechanic\u2019s shop to have the rear brakes replaced on my \u201cnew\u201d car.\u00a0 Well, long story short, getting replacement parts from Toyota<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3366,1263],"tags":[83,5169],"class_list":["post-36404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-life-in-dunwich","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","tag-family","tag-roots"],"yoast_head":"\n