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Where Did the Past Go Anyway?September 29, 2005 When I'd lived on Martha's Vineyard long enough to know a few people but not long enough to have much perspective -- two or three years, I think -- a friend lamented how "suburban" the island was becoming. I didn't get it. Suburban? Didn't the essence of "suburb" depend on having a nearby urban area to commute in and out of? Suburbs could no more exist without cities than parasites could exist without hosts. A suburb was by definition incomplete: without a city to provide nourishment -- jobs, entertainment, a regional hub -- the suburbs would die. Sure, there was constant traffic between the Vineyard and Boston, New Bedford, Providence, even New York, but very few Vineyarders went to the big city to work, or for a night's entertainment. Being an island, I thought, Martha's Vineyard was by definition too independent to be a suburb. Of course my friend was right. On some level I must have known it from the beginning, otherwise her words wouldn't have nagged at me so, and I wouldn't have devoted so much mental energy to wondering what she meant and convincing myself that Martha's Vineyard wasn't suburban at all. Didn't I know what "suburban" meant? Hadn't I been living not so long ago in Washington, D.C. -- in D.C., I hasten to add, not in the Virginia or Maryland suburbs -- and hadn't I grown up in a suburb of Boston? Hadn't I devoted considerable effort all my adult life to not living in a suburb? That was part of the problem: to me, calling a place "suburban" was like calling a person "racist," "homophobic," or (in some quarters) "fundamentalist" or "Republican" It's not just a description; it's a judgment. This is less obvious on the printed page than it is in speech, where the speaker's tone, facial expression, and body language make it clear. At that point Martha's Vineyard was my refuge, a place I'd escaped to that was better than the one I'd left, and I was going to defend it against all slurs. "Suburban" was a slur -- no doubt in my mind. I was also missing something important: what my friend said was that the island was becoming more suburban. She had lived here long enough to have something to compare it to. I hadn't. Like most new arrivals, I assumed that the status quo had existed forever and that history began when I showed up and started paying attention. I knew better, of course, intellectually at least. Lay it out there in black and white and what have I described? Uh, maybe the Europeans arriving in the "New World"? I marvel that World War II ended in 1945, only six years before I was born. If I hadn't studied history, and (maybe more important) spent uncountable hours listening to people of my parents' and grandparents' generations, World War II would seen as remote as the U.S. Civil War, or the voyage of Columbus, or the Pleistocene. Since I landed on Martha's Vineyard, I've spent uncountable hours listening to people who arrived 10, 20, or 30 years before I did, including people who were born here, including people who carry stories told by islanders of their parents' and grandparents' generations. What my friend meant by "how suburban the Vineyard is becoming" referred, in part, to how closely scheduled the lives of the children were becoming: once upon a time the Vineyard way (which also existed in the suburb I grew up in) left kids plenty of time to explore the world around them and make up their own games, but now they have music lessons on Monday, after-school sports on Tuesday, scouts on Wednesday . . . And baseball, football, hockey, and soccer are now organized and supervised by adults. Pretty soon most people won't realize that it hasn't always been this way, or that kids went out without cell phones because cell phones didn't exist. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana said it, and every self-respecting progressive likes to quote it -- taking it for granted, of course, that they are among the wise who remember the past and can make smart decisions about the present and the future. But some of the past can't be remembered until you've learned it the first time, and it's hard to learn something when you don't suspect it exists. Not to mention that sometimes the mere suspicion that something exists, or once existed, makes it hard to sleep at night, so we're often not eager to go looking for the past, or too curious about what we find. Trouble is, you can't really know a person, or a people, without knowing what shaped them, what they're reacting against, what they're trying to escape, and what they're trying to protect. The inability to remember the past is one thing; the unwillingness to consider it is something a little different.
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