Neighborhood Stories. Gale Zona
in cities – we lack imagination to visualize what is occurring. As far as our experience goes, the most of us are democratic. But when there arises an issue transcending our experience, our tendency is to uncompromising conservatism. And there is hope in the fact that politically many of us are free and think for ourselves, and smile at the abuse that is heaped upon great leaders, and understand with thanksgiving – away here in the village – how often the demagogues of to-day are the demi-gods of to-morrow.
We well know that with all this changing attitude, we are losing a certain homely flavor. Old possibilities, especially of humor, no longer have incidence. Our sophistication somehow includes our laughter. In these days, in what village could it happen, at the funeral of a well-beloved townsman, with the church filled to do him honor, that the minister should open his eyes at the close of the prayer, and absently say:
“The contribution will now be received.”
Yet that and the consequent agonized signaling of one of the elders are within my memory, and are indelibly there because they occurred at the first funeral in my experience, and I could not account for the elder’s perturbation.
Or, where among us now is the village dignitary who would take the platform to speak at the obsequies of a friend and would begin his eulogy with:
“I have always had a great respect for the deceased, for – [pointing with his thumb downward at the coffin] for that gentleman down there.”
Or, when a deacon with squeaking shoes is passing the plate, in what modern village church is to be found the clergyman who will call out:
“Brother, you’ll find my rubbers there in the lecture room. You best slip ’em on.”
Or the deacon who would instantly reply, overshoulder:
“I’ve got a pair of me own,” and so go serenely on, squeaking, to the last pew.
Yet these happened, not long ago, and we smile at the remembrance, knowing that just those things could not take place among us now. New absurdities occur. But there is a different humor, even of misadventure and the maladroit. Instead of deploring the old days, however, I think that nearly all of us say what I have heard a woman of ninety saying – not, “Things are not what they used to be in the old days,” but:
“Well, I’m thankful that I’ve lived to see so many things different.”
That is the way in which we grow old in the little towns of the Middle West. We are not afraid to know that old ways of laughter and old flavors of incident depart, with the old ills. Since disease and marching armies and the like are to leave us, humor and sentimentalism of a sort and gold lace of many sorts must likewise be foregone. We say: “The day is dead. Long be the day.” May we not boast of it? For such adaptation would not be wonderful in a city, where impressions crowd and are cut off. But it stands for a special and precious form of vitality, in little towns.
It is for this acceptance of growth that our days of pioneering together and our slow drawing together of later years form a solid basis. For we are knit, and now the fabric is beginning to be woven into a garment. Some are alarmed at the lack of seams, some anxiously question the color, some shake their heads and say that it will never fit. But there are those of us here in the village who think that we understand.
And now we are beginning to suspect that there is more to understand than we have guessed. For there was some one “From Away” who came to us and said:
“Your little town is a piece of to-morrow. Once a village was a source of quiet and content and prettiness. Once a village was withdrawn from what is going forward in the world. But now the village is the very source of our salvation, social and artistic. It is not that we are finding humanity at its best in the villages, but that there humanity is at the point where it is most in type. And in this lie the hidings of our power.”
We listened, not all of us believing. We were used to being praised for our cedar fenceposts, our mossy roofs, our bothersome, low-hanging elm boughs, even, of late, for our irregular streets and our creamy brick. But in our hearts we had been feeling apologetic that we had not more two-storey shops, not more folk who go away in Summer, and not even one limousine. And now we were hearing that we are playing a part social, artistic, which no city can play!
It is true that from the days of those old happenings which I have been recounting, down to now, the form of our self-expression has changed somewhat, its quality, never. Always we have been ourselves, simply and unreservedly. Not boldly ourselves, for we do not know that there is anything to be bold about. But in the small things, quite simply ourselves. And once I would have called that a negative quality…
But what of this salvation, social and artistic, and how are these to be fostered by our one characteristic? And with that, the cries of the world, from art, from life, are in one’s ears: Against imitation, against artificiality, against seeing the thing as a thousand others have seen it and saying it as a thousand others have said it, against moving in a mass which has won the right to no social adhesion, but instead stupidly coheres, and does its thinking by bad proxies. And we – who do already let ourselves be ourselves – who knows what contribution we may be bringing, now that there have come upon us these new reactions to convention, these slow new freedoms of belief?
There in the cities, humanity is in the melting pot, we say; and the figure is that of countless specializations dissolved in one general mass. We revert to type individually, but we advance to type collectively. Unquestionably this collective advance is a part of experience. But it is not an ultimate of experience. Somewhere there beyond, shining, is a new individualism, whose incarnations shall flow to no melting pot, but instead shall cling together, valued for their differentiation, and like a certain precious form of life, low in the scale, shall put out a thousand filaments, and presently move away together, a unit.
Already the individual experiences this progression – that is, he does if he does! – and, through his own unique value, wins back in later life to that simplicity which is every one’s birthright. It is Nietzsche’s threefold metamorphosis of the spirit: First the camel, then the lion, last the child. What if, standing in that simplicity, at the point where humanity is most in type, the village does open the social and artistic outlook of To-morrow?
Some of us believe. Some of us say: “What if the federation of the world is to begin in the little towns? What if it is beginning there now…”
“A village is nothing but a little something broke off from a city,” says Calliope Marsh, “only it never started in hitched to the city in the first place. And that makes all the difference.”
It is Calliope Marsh who tells, in her own speech, these Neighborhood Stories. And if she were given to selecting texts, I think that she would have selected one which says that life is something other than that which we believe it to be.
A GREAT TREE
I never had felt so much like Christmas, said Calliope Marsh, as I did that year.
“I wish’t,” I says, when it got ’most time, “I wish’t I knew somebody to have a Christmas tree with.”
“Well, Calliope Marsh,” says Mis’ Postmaster Sykes, looking surprised-on-purpose, the way she does, “ain’t there enough poor and neglected folks in this world to please anybody?”
“I didn’t say have a Christmas tree for,” I says back at her; “I says have one with.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that difference,” she says, “I’m sure.”
“I donno,” I says, “as I know either. But there is a difference, somewhere. I’d kind of like to have a tree with folks this year.”
“Why don’t you help on your church tree?” Mis’ Sykes ask’ me. “They’re going to spend quite a little money on theirs this year.”
“I hate to box Christmas up in a church,” I says.
“Why,