ON THE AVENUES: Walk on dead men.
A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
Yesterday was the 79th day of 2013, and it was my 70th day outside, walking for at least half an hour and often more. Most of these walks have been round trip jaunts from my house on Spring Street through downtown New Albany’s historic core.
This regimen has been intended to keep me active until it warms enough for biking, but it has been such a pleasant change of pace that a modified version of it is likely to continue throughout the year in conjunction with the two-wheeler. The overall plan is to be more regularly active, because exercise makes the good beer taste even better – almost like a reward, if you will.
Sadly I’m reminded that March walks in New Albany can be a difficult undertaking, not so much physically, but in terms of reduced human morale. This particular city, and probably many others like it, is best viewed when conditions are ideal. It is never more unattractive than in March, when the coldest weather already has passed and the growing season hasn’t yet arrived.
Until the greenery comes, one can clearly see every blemish and imperfection – the unkempt houses, the doggie droppings, and the voluminous garbage strewn seemingly everywhere.
There’s no mistaking: It’s depressing. We take it for granted that we’re a modern society – although I harbor no delusions pertaining to “enlightenment,” and what is meant by “modern” usually remains safely unexamined – and yet glancing around, one can’t help wondering whether New Albany’s chronic Battered City Syndrome (thanks, GC) is just too pervasive to be shaken.
And so I always think while walking: New Albany is 200 years old. Was it always this way?
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To know me is to understand my longstanding fascination with history.
When we stopped by the Carnegie Center last weekend to view the “Artists of Wonderland Way” exhibit, the paintings almost were secondary. I wanted to know more about the artists – their lives, times and stories. I wanted to know what this place was like when they were in their primes, and how they felt about it.
Back then, was there hope for a reasonable civic future, or did the low common denominator we tolerate (exalt?) in this present, benighted millennium suffice for them as absently as it does for us?
The answer’s probably obvious. Times change quickly, and people grudgingly.
One of my favorite modular phrases of late comes in handy, one restating Pogo’s most famous axiom: New Albany doesn’t have a (fill in the blank with annoyance) problem; it has a resident problem. Yes, the phrase is too cynically glib by half, but my guess is that even before World War I, frustrated New Albanians were muttering it amid the stasis.
Getting back to the art of the stroll (and the bike), walking affords ample time for reflection, and while the moments are filled with the usual ruminations on work and play, this botched bicentennial year has had me thinking about the uses of the past.
Most of us possess a personal narrative, a chronology of depleted years we’ve lived through, and of course our editorial attitude toward their recitation can be quite subjective. Some people actively erase their memories, often for very good reason. Why relive rotten times?
Others obsess over events and episodes, affixing artificially enhanced impact to their recollections. My own ghosts are many and varied, and words like “shoulda, woulda, coulda” bubble to the surface on occasion, but through it all, I try to stick to the task at hand and keep matters in my world moving forward.
Insofar as historical perspective assists this imperative, I indulge it. Some times it’s more useful, albeit it challenging, to make a clean break and innovate.
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As an individual consumed with history, I harbor no intrinsic objections to the notion of historical preservation. Generally speaking, I support it. At the same time, it strikes me that any unquestioned doctrine merits periodic surgical strikes of skepticism, and in the context of New Albany in the current age, there’s always room for ample doubt.
So it is that I keep asking myself and others: Why has the city’s bicentennial celebration thus far been so predictably, infuriatingly white-bread mundane, attitudinally speaking?
Maybe it’s because the past, while fascinating, also can be an 800-lb gorilla wearing a conceptual straitjacket. It can be re-interpreted, and these shadings actually change as time passes, because without learning from experience, what point is there? Still, overall, the historical record is fixed. It is what it was; for one to become immersed in it to the exclusion of future possibilities is like keep a foot clamped on the brake even after the light changes.
Somehow, for all my skepticism, and in spite of the March uglies, I remain convinced that the life and times of New Albany can be better and more expansive than this.
I believe New Albany can have nice things, new as well as old, though not just what the old persist in thinking is new, when it isn’t.
I believe that we actually can think our way through a wet beer label and grasp the modern world, in addition to respecting our history. Let’s have it all for a change.
I believe, contrary to the usual conditioned socio-economic responses and cultural proclivities, that older dogs can indeed learn newer tricks – and be a better animal for it.
New Albany’s not the only burg in the world where business “as usual,” blood feuds and certain fixed firmaments of the remote past tend to make progress toward the future more difficult. It’s just that I live and work here, and not in another burg somewhere else in the world. Hence, the chronology of my shtick.
New Albany doesn’t have to be the state of mind wherein focusing on remembering the past has the unintended consequence of constantly repeating the same mistakes. The present is its own future historical moment, isn’t it?
Can we please get started on it?
