This period between 1923 and the early thirties seems to me was the end of a rich community fellowship, the parties, and the ball teams of which each community had one… It was the end too of meetings at Larson’s Hall and these neighborhood times have never come back.
~ Roy Falk, 1977
Only recently has the idea of community piqued my interest. Why? Because before now, I didn’t know what I was missing. I didn’t know what a true community was. For the past year I have studied my great-grandfather’s (Roy Falk) memoirs in great depth. His words, as he reflects on his childhood, have started to stir up a sort of longing inside of me. A longing for “de good old days”. A longing for the way that neighbors came together in times of need, for the relationships that were forged between community members at the local creamery, for the way children gathered en masse to play games, and for the free time that was available to build a rich community fellowship.
My family and I are surrounded by thousands of people here in the suburbs, but you wouldn’t know this by taking a walk through our neighborhood on a typical day. No one is outside enjoying the perfectly manicured lawns, the giant playground sits empty – desperate for screaming children full of energy, and the walking trails are largely unused and quiet, which makes for wonderful wildlife viewing around the many ponds, but is not so great for meeting friends. I know that there is a simple answer for why this is – times have changed.
What is a community?
Community, as described by doctors David M. Chavis & Kien Lee, is about people. A community is not a school, a church, or a neighborhood – these are just places. It’s not the exchange of information over the World Wide Web – it’s much more than this. Community is:
…both a feeling and a set of relationships among people. People form and maintain communities to meet common needs.
Members of a community have a sense of trust, belonging, safety, and caring for each other. They have an individual and collective sense that they can, as part of that community, influence their environments and each other.
That treasured feeling of community comes from shared experiences and a sense of—not necessarily the actual experience of—shared history. As a result, people know who is and isn’t part of their community. This feeling is fundamental to human existence.
“De Good Old Days”
As I read my great-grandfather’s memoirs, examples of community are woven throughout. I wonder if he realized this. I imagine he did.
Group Gatherings
Great-Grandpa shared many stories where neighbors gathered together. For example:
The young people built a dance platform in the woods 1/4 mile from our house on the farm Pete [my great-grandfather’s uncle] had just sold. Pete and Betsy [Pete’s wife] both loved to dance… [August Helberg] was a violin player and played for the dances held in the woods where the young people had built the platform (no roof or walls). If it didn’t rain they had dances every Saturday night. We could plainly hear the violin at our farm if we listened.
and
Stanly Store was always an honest store, well-liked by the community. Trade during the time the creamery was running was heavy. The young fellows of the neighborhood would meet there any night to have a pleasant evening and I spent many evenings there. The store and garage and barn are all gone now, not a trace of it is left in 1975.
People gathered together to enjoy the company of others, build relationships, exchange stories, and explore common interests. But, these weren’t the only signs of a healthy community. Neighbors offering help in times of need was also an important part of my great-grandfather’s life.
In Times of Need
Great-Grandpa reminisced about the loving relationship between his mother and one of her best friends:
Here there lived a cantankerous old man called, or rather nicknamed, Rovel (Swedish) Warble Nelson on account of the peculiar way he talked. His wife and mother to the children was a great friend of my mothers and much respected in the community. She died around 1909 and as my mother had been with her much during her sickness, she had told whoever was home with Mrs. Nelson when she died should pull a curtain shade on a certain window. So, as we watched we saw the shade pulled. There was no telephone yet so this was just a way of communication.
About a teacher who was welcomed into his home as she began her career in the local one-room school house:
In 1915 or 1916, an Irish girl by the name of Molly Gilmore came to live with us and teach our school. She was a good teacher and much respected and loved by her pupils of which I was one. One thing she did that was unusual was she put up a hurdle for us in the school aisle using a long broom handle for a bar. This we could adjust by adding or taking away books. She taught us the high jump and some of us became proficient in this sport. I jumped six feet later on because I used to jump fences – sometimes to my sorrow!
Even when a new family moved into the town, poor and in desperate need of help, the community did all that they could:
The children were too young [there were five total]. They were desperately poor as they produced almost nothing to sell. The neighbors would chip in and provide help. My father took the sleigh and horses and collected a lot of flour, beans, spuds, groceries, rutabagas, etc., which was a great help… All the children of this family were successful after they left this home.
Neighbors also helped out on the farm:
Ole was a surgeon of no mean merit – he would come and castrate small pigs when asked and he would charge 25 cents regardless of how many pigs needed surgery. On top of that, he would expect a cup of coffee. He used turpentine as a disinfectant, so he always smelled strong of turpentine.
I get a kick out of this story every time I read it. Twenty-five cents and a cup of coffee. I can almost smell the turpentine.
From Thriving Communities to Ghost Towns
Community members played a big part in my great-grandfather’s life. Local midwives delivered the babies (not doctors), neighbors hitched a ride to church with each other, neighborhood children organized and ran baseball teams that practiced every day and played against other community teams, neighbors helped each other regardless of differences, and relationships were constantly being formed and enriched. Each community member had a purpose and found a way to contribute – communities thrived.
Times have changed.
Today, many households contain two working parents. Children go to school, many starting at the age of three, for six hours per day. After-school hours are filled with homework, structured sporting activities, quick dinners, and maybe an hour spent catching up with family members. No wonder neighborhoods sit empty – empty like ghost towns.
When neighborhoods are silent, there is no way to form relationships with other neighbors, no way for kids to run community baseball teams, no way to dance to the music of a local musician on a Saturday night, no way to meet up with friends at the local store, and no way to find out if one or more of your neighbors are in need of help. There is no way to form a rich community fellowship. I dream of “de good old days” where my great-grandfather remembered:
These same young people that played ball so well had a great time in other ways too, without spending money. Mostly, we met in homes to play parlor games in winter but in summer, ring games were enjoyed. Sometimes as many as 50 young people met to play. Some of the activities were:
- Gustav Skol [a Swedish square dance]
- Happy is the Miller boy
- Bingo
- The Needles Eye
- Captain Jinks
- Farmer in the Dell
There seemed to be an equal number of girls and boys so we really had a good time.
Maybe I’m poorer for realizing what once was, because now I know what I’m missing. I want to know: How can we bring back the healthy communities of “de good old days”? A place where members of a community care for each other and have a sense of trust, belonging, and safety. I want to know.
All global ambitions are based on a definition of productivity and the good life so alienated from common human reality that I am convinced it is wrong and that most people would agree with me if they could perceive an alternative. We might be able to see that if we gained a hold on a philosophy that locates meaning where meaning is genuinely to be found — in families, in friends, in the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive things out of which real families, real friends, and real communities are built — then we would be so self-sufficient we would not even need the material “sufficiency” which our global “experts” are so insistent we be concerned about.
~John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
I enjoy your blog so much. This was really touching!
Thank you, Sheila! I love that you read and take the time to comment. This piece went in a different direction than usual, but I’m glad I went with it. Great-grandpa’s writing kept touching on perfect community examples. Those we don’t tend to see anymore. It felt right to write about about it. ☺️
You and Grandpa Falk, with your writing talents, have undeniably been gifts to our family. At least I can say thanks to you!
Well, your comment just made my heart happy. Thank you so much for that! And, you are very welcome. It truly is my honor. I like to think that Great-Grandpa is aware of how much of an impact his writing has had (and is having) on our family. Thanks so much for reading and for your support. x
This post is both touching and thought provoking. Thanks.
Thank you for your kind words and for taking the time to comment! 🙂
You ask such a good question. I wish I had a good answer. I often find myself so pleased when my neighbors wave and smile at me, which they do in my new neighborhood. I actually got a little angry recently when my husband and I were running around the lakes in Minneapolis and no one would smile or wave back at me! I swear I tried ten times and each time someone looked away. But, upon reflection, I realized it’s certainly not me their rejecting. It’s just a sense of disconnection, of being in our own bubbles, like a membrane that grows thicker over time, settling around people. It’s as if our social joints stiffen like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz and we don’t quite know how to get ourselves going again.
But, though times are changing, not all the change is bad. I just commented to my husband that i never would have read this book I’m really enjoying had it not been for Hayley’s online book club. And her book club might not have started if I hadn’t touted the wonders of my real-life book club. And I never would have met Hayley if it wasn’t for the online community. Hayley, being thousands of miles away in England, would not be in my local community–and yet she’s part of my community. Perhaps it’s not so much a return to the old days that we want, but more engagement that feels authentic, vulnerable, and meaningful in the new world we live in today. Maybe we won’t meet to build a dance floor, but maybe we’ll collaborate on a campaign to raise money for victims of a disaster half a world away?
I definitely want more human connection, but I think it’s possible that connection can be just as real and meaningful as the communities we used to find solely in our neighborhoods. I’d like to think more about it though. Because I’m reading this book (from Hayley’s September Book Club), as I mentioned, and it’s scaring the heck out of me about the impact of technology on our brains. We’ve got much to think about and reflect on. Some amalgam of the past and the future, might well be the best way forward!
Thanks for the beautiful and thought-provoking post!
Angela, I need to get the name of that book! 🙂 Sounds like something I’d like to wade through. Yes, I find myself telling my husband, “Fb is sometimes my only connection with other adults during the day!” (he doesn’t care so much for social media). I think this is why I get such a longing for ‘real’ communities. The kind where the people around you are there for you through the good and the bad, they see you at church and at the store, they visit on weekends, and they call on the phone just to say “Hi!”.
That last comment sent before I was finished. 🙂 Oops! Anyway, I do believe that we can have strong connections with friends on the internet, with individuals who we volunteer with, or with another soccer family we meet at youth games, but I still hesitate to call them true communities. While these connections may be strong, these people do not surround us on a daily basis. Our internet friends probably wouldn’t fly in for a family funeral, and it would be hard for me to drive or fly out to help out if a friend is sick. And, we definitely wouldn’t have these people with us at church, meeting up at the local store, or have them here to help harvest the vegetables from our 12 gardens. My husband said today that we don’t have any of the ‘real’ communities anymore. Instead, people have given the word ‘community’ new definitions. It’s easy for people to say my ‘church community’, ‘school community’, ‘neighborhood community’ or ‘online community’. But in fact, these “communities” involve just one small part of each person’s life. It’s not the community of “de old days” where all of these facets of life were combined into one true community. The people who joined you in church, were also neighbors, school friends, weekend playmates, and friend who were there in good times and bad. This is what I wish I had experienced. And yes, with the technology that we have today, I don’t know if this will ever be possible. I hope I’m wrong in this. Angela, you always force critical thinking on my part. Thank you, and I appreciate you! 🙂
The book is “Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked.” by Adam Alter.
It’s almost scary interesting. I definitely think we need more “actual” human contact. The scary statistics show that kids in particular that spend too much time on screens don’t fully develop emotionally. SCARY! Humans need eye contact and shared experience in nature. So, your definitely right to want more community. I just wonder what the next emergence will be. Case in point, I just saw a woman who I know had an appendectomy from her post on FB and I considered not alerting her to my presence in the room. Here, I know she’s had major surgery, but I almost didn’t acknowledge her actual presence in the room! So your point is valid. We must do more for “de old days.” I wish I knew what the magic formula to restore more of the human connection could be. I think we need one of those people that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in “Outliers.” One of those uber-connectors who have the time and energy to be the one that gets neighbors together. Once we meet our neighbors, I think with a minimal amount of effort the relationships evolve and change. But that initial connection is so hard! (And also, I saw my first comment on the page and thought- WOW I wrote a lot!)
Yes the advantages of the online community are there too. I have got so much from my online social circle (inspiration from you for starters). It can really be wonderful.
Definitely! Your Princess post was the reason I started thinking about the topics I covered in the “Speaking and listening: the Power of Truth” post. Community is, at least in part, the sharing of ideas and inspiration. But, I think Erin’s point is well made. While what we’re evolving into has value, the real-life communities around us need some love.
Yes, there’s nothing like face to face company, but here’s to our online connection x
Absolutely! Friends, inspiration, and enjoyment have all transpired within our wonderful blogging community. I look forward to chatting with you and others several times throughout the week. x
That’s okay! I love long, thoughtful comments. Bring it on! And, yes! I believe that it could take just one or two people to get the dominoes started. Just bringing back a little of the old community would be nice. Thank you for the book title. I’m going to check it out!
This is wonderful! Community is a huge thing in our Indian culture, even today.
I love this, Ritu! I am so interested to hear how the Indian culture keeps community fellowship a priority. We could learn a thing or two from you (and be much better off)! 🙂
Oh I loved this. I adored the story of the whole community helping out the poor family. I cannot imagine that happening now where I live. I imagine people would just look down on them. It’s so sad & such a shame. Yes busy lives & pressures to have certain symbols in life have gone towards eradicating a community feel. Plus I feel the online community has had a huge influence on this to. People seem to be glued to their screens inside their houses more instead of getting out. Community is definitely something that needs to be addressed.
Very well said, Hayley! Yes, I think that technology has had a huge influence on the loss of community. When my husband and I were reflecting on my post, we noticed that many technological advances had happened right when my great-grandfather said he experienced the loss of community. Utilizing cars became widespread, telephones were now common, and people were able to travel into the cities for jobs, shopping, etc. Technology can be so amazing, and horrible at the same time. I wonder if people realized this when these inventions were realized.
And it’s all still so relatively new. As a society we’re still learning how to live with technology. I’m hoping rather optimistically it will come back round again. Maybe x
I wish there were more of a sense of community in our area. I think it’s something that is lacking in our society. Thanks for writing such a thought provoking post!
Yes! We are definitely lacking, and I wish there was more of a fellowship. I wonder if people were made aware of this if a sense of community would start coming back. Thanks for your kind comment, Lisa!
Hi!
When I saw your headline, I thought this would be about online communities of which there are many. That’s probably the answer to your question: online communities have replaced them.
Janice
I love your comment, Janice! “When I saw your headline, I thought this would be about online communities of which there are many.” It’s very powerful. And, I believe you are very much correct. It just goes to show how the online world invades our mind. Technology is integrated into our lives so much that we don’t have regular (face-to-face) interaction like we did when technology wasn’t here; therefore we can’t have the communities of “de good old days”. Angela wrote above about a book she is reading called “Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked.” by Adam Alter. I think I’m going to check it out! Sounds like this book could give us insight into how the online world is truly affecting us. Thank so much for reading and taking the time to comment, Janice!
I loved this post. I was only thinking about small town communities this morning when writing my reasons for liking some books I’ve been reading lately by Sarah Addison Allen. I decided much of it was the way she portrays the small towns in her books. It had me yearning after the same experience.
I wonder if, apart from the technology changes, that the growth of our towns is also some of the reason, few remain ‘small towns’ or if they do, many of those full of the energy to create a community, have left. So many towns are sprawling, one area spilling into another.
My husband and I often walk along the tow path of our local canal, we have both noted that the canal path users will mostly offer a greeting when passing; a smile, a thank-you a ‘Good-morning’. Yet when we turn off into the town, folks we meet on the street paths all avoid eye-contact and remain mute to greetings.
We haven’t left the same town, but it certainly feels like it.
The neighborhood where we live has also changed. Twenty years ago each house had children around the same age who played together, now the dynamics have changed, families have gone. Ownership has also changed and the rental market has brought an increase in almost nomadic individuals, who seem to be just ‘passing through’, not ready to put down roots.
I recently read a book which felt very real, it considered what would happen to us if one day soon, we reached a point where all technology ended. Tipping Point by Terry Tyler, book #1 is post apocalypse, a genre I’ve never really tried, but it is character driven rather than scifi and puts the need for community right back on the map.
Thank you for your post I really loved being a part of your family memoirs…..
Rosie, thank you so very much for your thoughtful response. And, I see that you feel the same as I do – a yearning for what used to be. You are lucky to have experienced a close-knit community. Although, maybe it makes it even more difficult when you experienced the change in that same community. I have never experienced a ‘real’ community as I have always lived in the suburbs of Minneapolis – St. Paul, here in MN. My city has always had 25,000-30,000 residents. Maybe that’s what I need to do. Go in search for a small town that still has that sense of community. 🙂 I wonder if one still exists. Thanks so much for reading, and I’m glad you enjoyed my great-grandfather’s writing!
[…] month. I am still going to be writing stories about topics that inspire me – hiking, animals, thoughts that grab my attention, gardening, the family farm, and painting (to name a few) – but my blog will be just one […]
[…] also imagine that this gave us a glimpse into what the old community felt like when my great-grandfather was young – the fellowship of community he often wrote […]