I love photographic images. I’m not so good at taking them myself. For example, the things I catch while on vacation aren’t exactly picturesque:
The view out of our hotel room window.
Breakfast at the Robin Hood in Rehoboth.
Reading by the pool.
Absolutely required dinner at Go Brit:
Room service?
One sight that draws me in, time after time, is this:
It’s a wall of retro candy in a little toy store along Penny Lane in Rehoboth. I return to it like a pilgrim to a shrine. It’s not because I eat any of these sweets. It’s because they speak to me of my childhood. People and places change or even disappear. Looking at those familiar wrappers brings it all back for a moment.
Look what I found from ten years ago: Something Sweet, August 23, 2016
I can't visit Rehoboth without stopping in to Fun For All! Toys on Penny Lane. Something about paying homage to the candy and toys of my childhood gives me a sense of reassurance. My childhood is still there. It hasn't been forgotten. I really lived in that world which now feels so different and far away.
I sometimes wonder if the people who grew up in a nascent Columbia have that same feeling. It must be difficult to see little pieces of their childhood slipping away. No matter how useful or exciting the evolution of their town, it is still different. And sometimes different just feels like loss.
This post was written as Columbia was prepared to celebrate its 50th birthday. As I reread my words I actually felt some painful twinges. I sense my naivety in believing that our community could have productive conversations about what we love and what we want to improve.
It feels particularly appropriate to me to take some time right now to celebrate the birth of Columbia and review its beginnings. There are some big decisions in progress about Downtown Columbia. Change is already happening. It is an ongoing process. What are the core things about our city that we want to champion and retain?
Are there things we absolutely want to protect? Are there things we've known we could be doing better, and this is a chance to move in a better direction?
I don’t feel that way anymore. I just feel tired.
If Columbia was anything from the beginning, it was aspirational. Not in an ambitious sense, but with an inborn vision to improve: to do better and be better. Yet I’ve been dismissed so many times as “not having lived here long enough” to have any opinion by folks with more nostalgia than ideas.
I woke up today realizing I have my own nostalgia: for the time I believed Columbia was still capable of the big ideas.
I’m not saying it isn’t. Hope springs eternal. I still love where I live and I’m grateful for my community. But I’m tired of the endless arguments where libraries are painted as scams, much-needed housing demonized as an invitation to crime, and community centers for young people are dismissed as a waste of money.
Columbia opened on June 21, 1967. It wasn’t finished, but it was ready. The new city had no problem attracting a diverse cross-section of residents and industries, and it quickly surpassed its development and cultural goals. It seemed, for a time at least, to have achieved its purpose, which was “the only valid ultimate purpose of any civilization,” according to Rouse: “ to grow better people; more creative, more productive, more inspired, more loving people."
- - James W. Rouse’s Legacy of Better Living Through Design, Jimmy Stamp, Smithsonian
For a time, at least, it seemed…
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