Reclaiming the Community We Always Wanted

I remember my father telling me that when he was growing up, his family—that had emigrated en masse from Hungary—grew a lot of their own food on their small lot on Washington Street in Boonton, New Jersey. They had fruit trees, they had trellises of grapes from which they made their own wine and they grew vegetables and herbs. Some of their neighbors had chickens. They kept pigeons, which apparently were good eating. They also had a root cellar for storing some of their crops for the winter. And it was a big day when the outhouse was replaced by indoor plumbing.

Dad's old homestead courtesy of Google Maps Street View.

My father said that he and his friends once got in trouble because they were caught overturning outhouses on Mischief Night before Halloween. There was no television, so people in the community used to get together for dances and socialize. He said that everyone truly wished the best for everyone else because getting by was so hard. I used to think that all of his tales of life before and during the Depression were all so strange and old-fashioned. Not anymore.

When I was very young, my father, like most people, walked every day to his local job. When the car became the norm, people ceased walking and drove to their jobs and everywhere else. They no longer needed a community. Or so they thought. Now I don’t want to upset anyone with predictions of doom. Things are happening in this country, but gradually, so there is plenty of time to make adjustments if you should choose to do so. Here are a few things you may want to consider.

“This world of ours... must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.”–Dwight D. Eisenhower

Food

If you follow the news, you may have noticed a corn drought in the U.S. Corn is an essential staple in our country because it is used for animal feed. The prices of corn have skyrocketed since there is so little of it, so farmers who would normally grow other crops, such as wheat and soybeans, are switching to corn to make more money, thus causing shortages of other crops. Frankly, I have no use for corn, whether it is for human consumption or fed to the livestock we eat, because most of it in this country is genetically engineered (GMO), but that is another blog altogether [click here to read about that]. The point is, that due to that drought, produce and livestock food prices will be going up.

Energy

I can only remember one or two blackouts all the years I was growing up. It was a rare event. In the past few years, power outages have occurred with disturbing frequency. When the power goes out, so does the heat, hot water, light and cable internet/television/telephone. You can sit in the cold dark and twiddle your thumbs. Last October, when it was 50 degrees, our power was out for a week. Not cold enough to freeze to death, but not all that comfortable either and a lot of our freezer/fridge food went bad.

Jobs

Like so many Americans, my husband and I have jobs where there are no vacation days or holidays. I am a freelance writer and he works as a retail manager for a locally owned business. If we get sick or otherwise can’t work, we don’t get paid. So how do we afford things when our budget gets lean?

Finding Alternative Ways to Live

Our garden features high deer fence, foot-deep groundhog deterrent.

So with food and energy sources being threatened, and jobs being moved overseas, what can the average person do? Well, it’s not easy to find affordable alternatives, but a few of them are out there.

We buy most of our produce from a local organic community-supported farm. To find one in your area, go to https://www.biodynamics.com/csa.html. In exchange for buying a share of the farm in installments, we get whatever the farmer produces that year. So no matter how scarce food may be in the parched Midwest or how high transport costs are for food grown overseas, we have a supply of produce throughout the year from a local source. We also built a critter-proof (we hope) garden in our backyard this year where we will try to grow as much food as we can using non-GMO heritage seeds. We also plan to learn canning although, sorry Grandma, that may have to wait for next year. We can only handle so much transition at a time.

Meet our alternative to expensive oil heat.

“The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.”—Mitch Albom

We cannot afford solar or wind energy. Right now, they are not priced for the average person. We decided, instead, to get a wood-burning stove to provide us with heat when the power inevitably goes out and to lower our insane oil bills. We chose a wood-burning stove over a pellet stove because pellet stoves require electricity to work. We chose cast-iron over steel because most reviews I read by users favored it for radiant heat that was not too overpowering. You can also put a tea kettle on top of it for hot water. I hope we can learn to properly use the damned thing so that our house doesn’t fill up with smoke or burn down. Wish us luck.

I joined a nearby time bank where you can exchange your skills or talents for other people’s services to save money on, say, home repairs or pet sitting or learning how to can food. See timebanks.org for one in your area. Also, we ask our family, friends and neighbors for help when we need it, something we were too proud to do in the past (not sure why). We intend to help them as well if they ask for anything. That's what community is all about.

I used to think that survivalists were crackpots. Not any more. Our government is corrupt and our economy has been hijacked by crooks in the financial industry and by the multinational corporate mafia. People like the Koch brothers (Google them) call the shots in Washington and elsewhere. They are not great humanitarians.

One of my old high school friends who migrated to California posted a manifesto on Facebook with advice (see poster above). It may not be all that far off.

I don’t know what the future holds, but I think if the average person bands together with their family, friends and neighbors—as they did when my father was young—we can definitely learn from each other, survive quite well and rekindle the sense of community that has long been lost from our society. Maybe, in the long run, our world could end up being a better place.

Communing With St. Thérèse

A rosary hangs near the chapel's altar.

Having grown up in Boonton, New Jersey—a working-class town—I always thought of nearby Mountain Lakes as being the place where the rich people lived. What I didn’t know was that it was also the site of St. Thérèse of the Little Flower shrine—a little-known pocket of peace hidden down at the end of a sleepy dead-end lane.

I’m not Catholic, so why bother visiting such a place? Curiosity. It was the site of a local miracle and I wanted to see the place for myself.

The Story of Achille Arci

The small shrine represents a promise kept by Achille Arci back in the 1920s. 

Arci became very sick and was told by physicians bereft of bedside manner that he was incurable. Arci didn’t want to accept that prognosis, so he prayed fervently to St. Thérèse for help. He promised her that if he was cured, he would build a shrine in her honor and visit her home in France to pay his respects. Apparently, St. Thérèse liked that idea, because after a five-year battle with his illness, Arci was suddenly and miraculously cured.

Stained-glass windows grace the two side walls of the shrine.

Keeping his promise would require the help of friends. He formed a small society of devout Catholics to build a modest shrine to St. Thérèse. The group solicited donations and volunteered labor to make the small shrine a reality. In 1933, it was erected on what was then Arci’s property.

In October 1952, Arci traveled to Lisieux, France to visit St. Thérèse’s home. When he returned, he continued tending to the shrine until his death in 1957.

A halo of bricks encircle the front door.

The shrine property ownership was eventually transferred to Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church in Boonton. Arci’s family continues to maintain the grounds in loving memory of their father and out of their devotion to St. Thérèse.

Who Was St. Thérèse?

Not being Catholic, I had to do some research to find out about the woman behind the saint. St. Thérèse of Lisieux was born in 1873, the same year a cigar-chomping President Ulyesses S. Grant was presiding over a post-Civil War United States.

Born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin, she was a French Carmelite nun. Perhaps due to her sense of religious commitment at an early age, she is also known as “The Little Flower of Jesus.”  In 1888, at the age of 15, she became a nun and joined two of her older sisters in the cloistered Carmelite community of Lisieux,  Normandy.

During her nine years as a Carmelite nun, she wrote The Story of a Soul, a collection of autobiographical manuscripts. In 1897, she died of tuberculosis at age 24, at which time her writings were printed and distributed. They quickly spread, making her one of the most popular saints of the Twentieth Century. She was beatified in 1923, and canonized in 1925.

The Shrine in Mountain Lakes

St. Thérèse smiles down on everyone who enters.

Thanks to Google Maps, my friend, Zoë, and I were able to find Rock Lane, a small side road off of the main Boulevard in Mountain Lakes. At the entrance to Rock Lane is a modest sign for the shrine. We drove up a hill through a residential area and at the end of the road sat a small white chapel with a halo of bricks encircling the front doors.

Inside, were five or so rows of folding chairs facing an altar. And in one corner of the room was a large statue of St. Thérèse, holding a bouquet of roses and smiling down at us. A donation of 50 cents was suggested to help maintain the shrine. I lit a candle for my deceased relatives. Then I used the suggested prayer to ask for personal favors. Since I prayed for four people—asked for four favors—I left four donations.

Zoë and I sat there for about a half hour, enjoying the peace of this local, out-of-the-way gem. The names of families I had grown up with in nearby Boonton were listed at the bottom of the stained-glass windows on both sides of the chapel.

I guess it might not be the type of sight that would be listed in the entertainment section of the local newspaper, but it was a serene diversion for one humid, summer afternoon in the ritzy wilds of Northern New Jersey.

Paradise Lost

The first job I ever had was working for a small weekly newspaper in Boonton, New Jersey, called the Times Bulletin. Tom Trenholm and his family had owned the paper since the 1800s. That fact was proudly displayed on the masthead of the newspaper. When you walked into the Times Bulletin building, you could smell the melted lead that went into the molds—known as hot type—that would become the printing plates for the next newspaper.

Mr. Trenholm was slightly overweight, always chewed the remains of a big cigar and lived in town. Things were slow and personal and friendly. I was 16 years old and Mr. Trenholm was glad to have me as a weekly humor columnist despite my lack of resume. After all, I was Louise and Al’s kid from down the block, and he thought it was nice that I wanted to write.

I don’t mean to sound like a walking antique, but I miss those days when business was personal on all levels, not just in the boardroom inner circle. After several generations in Mr. Trenholm’s family, the Times Bulletin was purchased in the late 1970s by a newspaper chain that closed it down and left our small town without the heritage of a caring, local paper. They now distribute a pre-fab newspaper with some localized news of Boonton and several other communities thrown in. I don’t know if any of the people who work for the paper have ever lived in Boonton or even know all that much about the town.

While I didn’t realize it back in the Seventies, the day of the small family-owned business was becoming endangered as large businesses in the next few decades would hungrily devour them or undercut them with low-priced foreign labor. Local hardware stores, clothing stores, drugs stores and dime stores fell victim to larger chains, and many Main Streets withered with the advent of malls.

This is not to say that people are not starting their own businesses anymore. They certainly are. But this is often done with the goal of being bought up by a larger company so the owners can retire as millionaires, as opposed to handing the business down to the next generation and keeping things personal. My last full-time job as a writer, before I went freelance, was for a company that made the transition from a quirky, fun-loving entrepreneurial environment to a more driven, self-important corporate milieu. I’ve seen it happen many times over the years and it never ceases to inflict me with culture shock.

I guess that’s progress. Corporations employ many people and there are workers out there who thrive in an impersonal corporate environment. Perhaps my discomfort with it is simply a sign of age. Or perhaps I’m just old enough to remember what others may never know.