THEN AND NOW

Hanns F Skoutajan

“Parting is such sweet sorrow.”  Having done lots of parting and perhaps not enough partying I can well attest to the truth of this adage.  I have experienced both the sweetness and the sorrow that is so much a part of living.

But I have also met some who have never experienced ‘the move.’ In my former congregations there were always some who had been born and lived and died in the same community. I particularly recall two spinster sisters who had never left the ancestral home or each other. I marvelled, envied and pitied them.

True enough, they had seen change  in all around them, saw their community metamorphose from a small incestuous hamlet to a commuter community. It was gradually populated by newcomers who wanted changes  - utilities that were totally lacking in the earlier lifetime of these women. 

Their outhouse still stood, somewhat rakishly, in the backyard of their property. On the kitchen counter rested a small pump that had supplied wonderful water from a well  down below. It was no longer in use but remained as a kind of memorial to an older way of life. Parting with pump and outhouse, was it a sweet sorrow?

One of their weekly outings was to the funeral home up-street “to visit the dead,” as they referred to this ritual. They had after all been their contemporaries with whom they had grown up, gone to school, all eight grades, met daily at the general store and the postoffice to get a few pieces of mail but also to exchange neighbourhood gossip. They never missed going to church, though I often wondered what they made of my progressive theology . 

The newcomers had little knowledge of those “good old days.” It was a sad occasion when the village cop, who had also grown up in this community, was traded for the services of the OPP, which doubtless was more efficient but who were strangers who didn’t know the territory or its history. 

The two siblings lived to a ripe old age and their departure came only months apart. Their house was sold, then demolished, to be replaced by one of those modern bungalows with plastic sidings. Children played in the driveway, also new. A basketball hoop hung over the garage door but a clothesline was missing out back. TV dishes came and went. 

I have always enjoyed the study of history. Invariably it is the account of partings and arrivals, a tale of sweetness and sorrow and of course the excitement of discovery as well as the terror of war. In my lifetime I have experienced the sorrow of walking from my childhood home with a backpack and a small suitcase clinging to the hand of my mother. There was nothing sweet about our departure for an unknown future. As the train pulled out of the station I took careful note of the cracks in the concrete of the platform and wondered if and when I would walk on them again.

Those two venerable elderly citizens of small town Ontario had no comprehension of my story. Leaving home and kindred was totally out of the realm of their experience or imagination. Our lives were worlds apart.

I do not denigrate their lives. They had known departures, not theirs, but their neighbours, the boys, and some girls, who left to fight for “king and  country” in not one but two world wars, some of them never to return, a war that was fought thankfully far from their doors. They also knew the hardship of the depression when life was difficult and their income as seamstresses covered only the barest of necessities. 

They didn’t change, everyone in the community would vouch for that.  But life all around changed. Stubbornly resisting the new they were nevertheless swept along as with the periodic flooding of the nearby river. 

Today change is everywhere and constant.  My own neighbourhood is undergoing change  as modern dwellings, as much glass as brick, are replacing venerable gracious  old homes with “centre hall staircase and gumwood trim” as the realtor reminded prospective customers. A recent devastating fire on main street left room for a multi-story, mixed commercial and residential development that will change the street, hopefully for the positive. “The  village will never be the same,” is an oft repeated commentary of the locals. 

A week ago I wrote about the rediscovery of my treasure trove of old Geographical Journals (1938 - 48). One of the things that fascinates me is not only the black and white photos and accompanying articles but the ads that betray the way of life back 70 years ago. They also advocated change but from previous ways to a new and different future, one much to be desired, better cars and milder cigarettes. The whiskey is still the same. 

It seems that we are in race with time. What concerns me most is that my granddaughter, who will be subject to many and constant changes, may not have time to experience and savour the sweetness and sorrow that is so much a part of history.

I fear that we have become so preoccupied by change that we forget the past and miss its lessons. High expectations as well as a plethora of newfangled gadgets with short life expectancies, that each of us can’t afford not to have, have carried the day.  Old values and ways of life are forgotten or frowned upon. In no way do I advocate a return to the good old ways, which is of course an impossibility, but rather to learn from the past, blemishes and all.

The speed of life accelerates. The moon and  stars are no longer familiar sights in the night sky to be known by their constellations but are looked upon as destinations to be mined or even  visited. Some are buying one-way tickets to Mars with no prospect of a return. Sweet sorrow!

What I am pleading for is the fostering of a sense of time, its passage from the then to the now, and the patience to learn from what has gone before, its sweetness and its sorrows.

SQ 10/10/2013

Look to MYQUEST for previous stories.