Re-Purposed

There's something about giving new life to the dead and dying.  Our town is rich in imagination and possibilities for the would-be forgotten structures of another era. 

In another life, the Ritz (above) was one of two movie theaters in this small Mississippi community.  We could, literally, walk from our home on Main Street, pay our 25-cent admission, buy a box of Milk Duds at the counter, and halfway through "The Blob" find a moist chocolate puddle in our hands, squeezed to a sticky pulp during the scary parts of a movie that now seems silly.

Today the former theater is a beautifully restored facility that has new life as a conference center.  A new generation is discovering it as a location for wedding receptions, proms, and civic meetings.  The adjacent Ritz Cafe in an earlier time was the F.W. Woolworth, the place my brother once spent an entire $5 for Christmas gifts for the whole family.  We all received a box of Luden's cherry cough drops, and he bought himself an airplane model.  Who's seen an F.W. Woolworth in decades?  Wedge salads and tomato basil soup have replaced it here.

Farther down the street a flower/gift shop is in the home of a former drugstore, a longtime institution in a once-thriving downtown community.  The orignal  owner's name is still carved in marble over the entrance, but today the space dispenses calla lilies and tablescapes.  The police department has reclaimed a former television station; an appliance store houses the spirit of a long-forgotten department store; and a bank anchors the corner where fashionable ladies once bought fine clothing.  On another corner, the Methodists have reinvented a former hotel as retirement apartments for the elderly.

I love seeing the morphing of places I knew in childhood into something vital and imaginative.  I live in the same house I did as a child, but the town around me is completely new.

It makes me wonder if we can do the same with our "old" selves.

Words that aren't

Is frumpled a word? If not, it should be.

I have an image of wrinkled, unkempt, dowdy, unpolished all wrapped neatly into a compact two syllables. Far better than frumpy because it says so much more. Why use just one paltry word when you can merge two?

In the list of words that haven’t yet made it into their proper linguistic respectability, I could suggest a couple of others. My mother used to insist someone was flustrated, thereby neatly combining frustrated and flustered. Usually, I was both by the time we had a conversation requiring that word.

And perhaps we could introduce parsinickety, someone who is both parsimonious and persnickety, a fussy miser. I know plenty of those.

It's called mincing words, I guess.  It could be a lot of fun.  Do you have others?



Stay connected

To admit my age, I remember the first long-distance phone call I ever made.  As a child, I found it almost a Christmas-like experience to be able to talk to a friend who’d moved to another state. A wall-mounted, black telephone with a rotary dial was my lifeline to a disembodied voice. I couldn’t imagine the friend’s new home, her new room, her new school, or her new friends. In fact, I was having a hard time imagining her at all. Her face was dissolving even as we struggled to find still-common ground. I felt that I was speaking to a void.

Today, even the folks closest to us are lost in that void. How many face-to-face conversations do we really have?

We text each other from different rooms in the same building. Increasingly, even those disembodied voices on a telephone—most often a cell phone—are a last resort ONLY if texts, emails, or Instant Messages fail. “Facebook” is a verb, we tweet to complete strangers as though we know them, and we invent, by the moment, new electronic connections to remove us from the messy necessity of human contact.

In the click of our mouse, we can “unfriend” someone. And, as growing cybercrime shows, it’s all too easy to create a persona that masks the truth and causes all kinds of malicious possibilities.

All these connections have created a disconnect that makes communication not only disembodied, but frequently anonymous. It’s easy to assume there’s no responsibility or accountability for the words of an online persona. Tragically, many have found otherwise.

There are good things, to be sure, and I love that part of social media especially. Friends long lost are now regularly in my Facebook news feed. But I’m also alarmed that we’re losing the delicate nuances of human interaction, our ability to “know” another in dimensions that require time and space and all of the human senses.

We tweet, we blog, we Facebook, we email, we post. We “talk,” but does anyone hear?

Tinsel-Down

It's January 4.  And the Christmas lights in our small town are keeping an early morning vigil, sentinels of a season now past. It's the paradoxical season of letdown endings and new beginnings.  It's the season of fresh starts and leftovers.  It's hope for what lies ahead and disappointment for what was left behind. We're in that caught-in-between-time.  Are we waxing or waning?

I never know what to make of the first of a year.  Those of us who don't value sleep stay awake until midnight to cheer the dropping of a ball and a brand-new date on our calendars.  The realists among us know that new date also signals time lost, never to be regained.  Time may be opening a new vista in front of us, but that vast chasm left behind us grows ever larger while what lies ahead is ever-shrinking. 

So, as we start the beginning of new year, I always wonder.  Are we celebrating the possibilities?  Are we whistling at a wake? 

What do you think?

Persephone descending

It's a season of endings.  Glorious, brilliant departures.  The final burst before the drab, dreary Novembers of our souls.  The time in the South when we can revel in the softening sunlight that leaves our days too soon in darkness. In the monochromatic Mississippi winter, we'll look wistfully over the horizon for signs of the first hyacinth. 

Persephone, that goddess of spring, is about to descend into the underworld. This is my favorite time of year, warm with a bittersweet beauty all the more lovely because of its briefness.  Each tree vies with the next for brilliance, dropping their colors even as I stroll by.  

Soon, these flaming canopies will be anorexic arms stretched before a blank sky.  To me, winter is the invisible season:  the in-hiding season, the time of drawing to the fire and crossing your arms against the wind outside the door.  I enjoy this beauty today with the knowledge of its coming absence.

 It's the season I always turn to Gerard Manley Hopkins, who beautifully captured the tension of transience.

Spring and Fall

to a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow's springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

 

I wish I had a river

It's the 12th of November, but it seems to be coming on Christmas.  Or so the signs and non-seasonal decorations tell us.  Last night as I drove home in the post-Daylight Savings Time darkness, I noticed the local county co-op alight with wreaths, ornaments, and outdoor garlands.  It's the same everywhere I look.  It's been that way here in the nearly tropical South since sometime before Halloween, when I passed a fashionable home long after dark and noticed a fully decorated, brightly lit Christmas tree glowing in the living room.

What's going on here?  I'm feeling holiday compression.

Advent, to me, is a particular and very special time in the religious tradition I celebrate.  It's come, instead, to mean the Gold Rush of sales promotions, the stampede to living better materially. People actually get up at 2 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving to get those 5 a.m. WalMart promotions.  Me, I sleep in.

We're not in the Southern hempisphere, just the American South, for goodness' sake.  The heart of the Bible belt.  Please, please, please give me some breathing room to celebrate Thanksgiving and time to remember all for which I'm truly grateful.

Give me a river.  A Joni Mitchell blue one.

It's coming on Christmas

They're cutting down trees

They're putting up reindeer

And singing songs of joy and peace

Oh I wish I had a river

I could skate away on

But it don't snow here

It stays pretty green

I'm gonna make a lot of money

Then I'm going to quit this crazy scene. . .

Well, at least part of that is true.  And to all, I say, enjoy the fall while we have it.