Memory v. history

We're fortunate, in these hard economic times, to have with us many people whose life experience extends back to the Great Depression. There is a crucial difference between memory and history. History tends to repeat itself, not because we are incapable of learning from the past, but because the job of learning is much harder when it must come from the dry pages of recorded events. Learning from the people who have "been there and done that" works a lot better. For example, to understand the prevailing economic theories and conditions that led to the collapse of the world economy 80 years ago, you might turn to history. To learn how to eat cheap while patching together a living, a living memory is what you need.


This summer, NCPR is putting modern North Country teens together with people who were teens during the Depression in a project called Common Wealth, Common Wisdom. Working together, teens and elders will pool their experiences of hard times, using audio, video, pictures and text, sharing the results with the NCPR and audience and the world through broadcast, webcast and social media. We welcome back former NCPR reporter and founding All Before Five host, Gregory Warner, who ramrods the project along with radio producer Laura Starecheski, now a professor at the City University of New York. Please check out the project on the NCPR website.

A misunderstanding

One day my brother-in-law Bill turned to my friend Paul and said, "I need a job." Paul, apparently having his mind on other matters, said "What do you mean?" Bill, counting the words on his fingers, repeated "I…need…a…job! No job, no money--no money, no go beer store. Which word didn't you understand?" This is how Main Street understands money. It's the paper you pull out of your pocket at the convenience store; it's the gas in the debit card. It's the ruinous bill from the contractor, the little bone you're thrown in the pay envelope. It's the ready, the moolah, the wherewithall, the long green.

Somehow, in migrating from the leather of the wallet to the glass and steel of Wall Street, it undergoes a transformation, becoming instead financial products, liquidity, leverage, underperforming assets. (Who knew money could dance, even badly?) And lately, we hear of "toxic, radioactive assets." Green Kryptonite, one supposes, deadly to Masters of the Universe. Everybody understands a thousand dollars, but nobody understands a trillion dollars. CNN tried to humanize the proposed Wall Street bailout number by comparing it to 2000 MacDonald's apple pies for each man, woman and child in the country. Ewwww! However you slice it, Main Street is angry, and you can bet they're gonna want fries with that. It's just a question of who to drop in the fryer.

Three Bowls

There had been much talk lately about the so-called "hundred mile diet"--living primarily or completely on foods grown and prepared within 100 miles of where you live. Economy looks very different when one of the factors in the bottom line is "Do I know who grew this? Do I know who made this?"

Lately, my wife and I have been getting a lot of use out of three bowls, survivors of a set of four thrown and fired more than 30 years ago in the house where we lived with our potter friend, Annie. Any vessel would do to keep the soup from our lap, but the feel and the history and the look of these particular bowls add to the savor of anything contained within. The profile is a simple unbroken curve of high-fired stoneware with a milk-white crackled glaze. Each is decorated with a few seemingly offhand brush strokes that suggest a cobalt flower with translucent leaves. And each has an elegant bulb handle, itself a tiny separately-thrown pot, half closed at the top, with its foot smoothly mated to the curve of the body. The notch is a perfect fit for the thumb web when the bowl is cradled in the palm to feel the warmth within. They are not identical as machine ware, but are meticulously consistent, in the way a quality crafter demonstrates focus and integrity.

They were made as gifts for my mother-in-law, and returned to our hutch on her death a few years back. So whenever I use one now, I think of Annie, and I remember my mother-in-law, Betty, as I turn it slowly in my hand to admire. What would we own and what would we pass over, if this was the standard toward which our desires aspired?

Curmudgeon in the ruins

As a child, I was fascinated with ruins and relics, playing in abandoned houses, the wreckage of old mills and factories. I preferred the rooftops to the streets, the spillway to the beach. I hid treasure in crawlspaces under carriage houses, in the insulation of attics. Nothing could beat the plunder of an old cracked leather trunk. Ruination is an ongoing process. By conventional wisdom, it's the flip-side of progress. More bodies, more mouths—the old must make way. But consider a moment--St. Lawrence County has roughly the same population now that it had in 1910. No more bodies. How does that change the logic of progress? What does the maxim "grow or die" mean, when we seem to have been doing neither for the last century? What would a development model look like where the new was seen as an option, not an automatic necessity? Growing older and more ruinous myself, renovation starts to look more attractive than demolition. After all, this new stuff is just the ruins of the future.