I found a book the other day that described a part of my life, however small. I always pay attention to such things. I remember reading once about a giant mafia conspiracy to smuggle drugs into this country from Italy back in the 1980s. Suddenly, midway through the book, a part of my life enters the pages! The authors write that a pay phone behind a lonely little pizza place in a small town in Oregon, Illinois was one of the key phones used by this worldwide organized crime syndicate.
In other words, while myself and other local camp counselors were eating pizza on a Friday night, relaxing after an exhausting week with some kids, a few feet away, behind the joint, millions of dollars of heroin was being ordered by phone to be sent to America.
Some personally-angled stories that I run across aren't quite so stunning. Like this latest find. You see my wife, Diane, and I are both from really small towns in Illinois. And the book I was holding the other day was describing a trip the author (Truman historian David McCullough) was taking with famous photographer David Plowden, back in 1981. And Plowden drove to Diane's old hometown, where she was a little girl.
And he liked this viewpoint -- thought it would make a great picture. It was of the side of a hardware store near the railroad tracks and on Main Street. This town, Gilman, was, in 1981, just starting the shrinking process that almost all small towns are now going through, shrinking into nothingness. And this is what drives Plowden, the photographer, crazy.
As Plowden takes a black-and-white picture of the words "Roeder's Hardware" painted on the side of the building, he tells McCullough, "You know what I really love about doing this? In a sense I preserve this little place -- I caught it, and it won't disappear. It's been held. There's something about this particular moment, this particular little corner -- and [now] it's not going to go [away]...I love that feeling: I love that feeling of getting this place." You see, Plowden is on a rescue mission. He talks about "everything disappearing," but as long as he's taken a picture of it, he's saved it, forever.
But what has he saved? Well, as I look on the internet for items about "David Plowden," I find his very own website, and on it are some photos he has taken, subdivided by genre. One of them, of course, is "small towns," so I click on it and see that there are 58 photos in this section; the site forwards me through the pictures in record time. I see pictures of stores and railroad tracks, and houses and farms, and people from small towns in Ohio, New York, Vermont, Pennsylvania, etc. On the 28th of the 58 photos I find...the Roeder's Hardware sign. I can't believe it. There it is.
And I'm thinking that, okay, I don't know how artistic it is, but it's nicely done. And I know what he's getting at, anyway, without looking at this photo. There's a romance about small town life, that it is somehow more innocent than life in the big city. And we all long for that innocence, even if some of us (and that includes Plowden) don't want to live there anymore.
We all long for something we have lost. A lost innocence. Pastor Paul quoted from the psychologist Erik Erikson last Sunday. Erikson said something like, "None of us likes change because, inevitably, change involves loss." And we can all look back to a time when we were "blissfully innocent" of one thing or another. But we are sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. We ate the forbidden fruit. We know of good and evil and a whole lot of other things we sometimes wish we never knew.
Take that Roeder's Hardware photo. In the back there are things that look like propane tanks. Now if you had asked me about propane tanks several years ago, I would have told you all about their innocent uses. But just today we received word that the fellow who tried to blow up Times Square Saturday night used propane tanks to kill people. Too much information.
But we can't go back. Only rarely does our Holy Scriptures describe heaven in terms of Paradise for the simple reason that in getting to heaven we will not be dumb again. But that's OK. You see, Adam and Eve did not know Jesus Christ. But now we do. We may wish we were not a part of the struggles of life beyond paradise, but experiencing the evil also means we experience the extra good goodiness of God, and of people who have God working through them, as they love us. As St. Paul wrote, "I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord." (Philippians 3:7)
McCullough wrote, while he was in Gilman, that, compared to the previous small town, at least Gilman had a "Ben Franklin (chain) Store." Well, the internet search tells me that Ben Franklin is out of business -- the auction was in 2008. And one of the things auctioned was "a large bill collector's desk from Roeder's Hardware." I like to think someone is taking good care of it right now, putting it to good use in their home.
David Hewitt
