A few days ago, I was reading about fragility issues with the ancient sewage and water pipes of my old town of New Orleans, which got me wondering about the pipes of Ashfield.
“I’ll ask Norm about that,” I thought, going instinctively to my neighbor who was the town’s first plumber, back in the day.
Except, of course, Norm Nye departed the Earth in December, taking his knowledge and tools with him when he left.
“Bill Perlman would know,” I then thought, before my brain acknowledged that Bill, the guy who knew everything in town, was at that moment lying in hospice in New York City, his own brain quiet, unresponsive and making plans to join Norm, which he has now gone on to do. And now, Phil Nolan, everyone’s friend who ran Ashfield’s town dump from 1987 until last month when he succumbed to an accident, has left us as well.
Legend has it that deaths come in threes. I hope the Fates have thus been satisfied for a long time.
I know now where grumpy old people come from, and I recognize that it’s not simply a sour disposition on life, but rather, a funk that stems from not only all that’s gone, but recognition that the draws that used to keep us looking with excitement to the future are fluttering out. We’re no longer in the ring of cool kids people want to hook up with to advance their ideas. We’re being replaced by new, younger ones who see all the knowledge we innovated our ways through as useless junk-drawer relics while our friends, the really cool kids, are checking out and leaving us behind.
“Ain’t like it used to be” wanders around a town looking at the places we used to go, the people who taught us what we know, and the memories that carved our hearts and sculpted our brains into the people we became. And more than that, we look at the world and its evolutionary train hell-bent on turning the future into a place we don’t recognize at all, so we turn our backs on, even, entertaining the thoughts.
As I shun artificial intelligence and worry about the life skills, jobs and self-reliance I fear it will steal from our young’uns, I wonder how our ancestors viewed the Industrial Revolution when new machinery upended their lives in much the same way. I’m not defending or minimalizing AI here; I’m just thinking about how things haven’t been like they used to be throughout most of history, which is how old people have become the iconic grumpsters of every age since, I reckon, the invention of the wheel. “Back in the day we used to walk everywhere and dragged our stuff behind us. Not like kids now, joyriding all their possessions all over the place!”
When I arrived in Ashfield 20 years ago, I was thrilled by the old New England accent I heard from the town’s elders, where “I” was a diphthonged “Oy” and the letter “R” was legitimate as a sound for the front of a word, only. Don’t heah it so much eny moa; the eldas a’ takin’ it with ’em as they depaht. Only 20 years in, I miss that accent in Willie Gray’s voice as much as I do his legendary sugarhouse and all his old stories.
When Bill Perlman moved to town in the early 1990s, he found his roof needed fixing and was told by the locals he should hire Willie to fix it. He made the call and a few days later came home to find his roof repaired with a hand-written note taped to his door that read, “I don’t know who you are, but you owe me $200.”
Do we have that kind of trust in strangers anymore?
I was recently talking with a 19-year-old friend of mine in New Orleans. I had just seen the film “The Testament of Ann Lee,” about the Shaker community that found Ashfield a welcoming haven in the mid-1780s, and I’d been pondering what the town might have felt like in those days. I asked my young friend if there was a previous era in history she thought would be interesting to visit. She replied, “I think it would have been neat to live in a time when people spoke to each other on the street.” An era just as alien to a teen in the cellphone-infested throngs of a large city as 18th-century Ashfield would seem to me.
Which makes me perk up and embrace the Fates that landed me in the era I did — post-World War II in the wild hippie age, pre-Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (a city that isn’t the same since) and in a part of the country that, while I miss what’s gone, clings a lot closer to the old days and ways than most places in this country do. Now, if everyone would just stay on this side of Heaven a little longer …
Nan Parati lives and works in Ashfield, where she found home and community following Hurricane Katrina. She can be reached at NanParati@aol.com.