My Little Town: Celebrations and Moments of Nostalgia in Upstate New York
The first time I can recall feeling shocked at how a certain place can change, I was a teen in a tiny upstate New York village called Franklin. My school was burning down in the middle of the night. This happened a few hours after I sent up a fervent prayer to God, asking him to please save me from the humiliation of performing in a school play the next day. I hadn’t learned my lines.
Was this divine intervention? No, although I do have reason to believe that the spiritual force overseeing our lives can have a very black sense of humor.
Part of my shock had to do with the sudden realization that I didn’t hate that place. I loved the school to the bottom of my toes and top of my head. I guess you could say I still feel that way about the whole town.
I had another stunning moment last weekend when I returned to Franklin after many years away. In fact, I think my father’s and grandmother’s brains would have exploded if they’d seen what I did. The building that once contained their quaint country hardware had been transformed so dramatically, it was astonishing. Today, it is a sophisticated design studio, of the sort that can be seen in New York and other major cultural hubs.
Big Fish in a Little Town
The new owner of the building, which also includes a former feedstore, is Lava Interiors. It’s headed by interior designer Meg Lavalette. Her work has been featured in Architectural Digest. And Foyr.com — a site for those involved with interior design and real estate — named her one of the top 20 most influential and famous designers. Meg’s clientele is largely high-income New Yorkers, and she has an office in the city as well.
Bear in mind that Franklin has a population of about 1,000, and it’s three-and-a-half hours from New York City via car. It was a source of inspiration for a location in my book “The Juice.” When I was young the place was very country, very Norman Rockwell, with two major streets lined with several elegant, wedding-cake-like homes owned by adults who were low/middle-income and working-class. People of Color were a rarity. Heck, even Catholics were kind of exotic. The number of transplants from New York and New Jersey was also very limited, and their flat accents stuck out oddly to native Franklinites like me.
All of this by way of explaining that the reincarnation of the hardware store would have seemed like a very far-out science fiction story, if I’d known that was coming, back in the day. My father and grandmother would have been transfixed by Meg. When I met her, she was rocking some sexy high heels and a sophisticated black jumpsuit.
As it happens, right now I’m just reading the fantasy novel “The City We Became,” by one of my favorite authors, N.K. Jemison. In it, there are characters who personify New York’s five boroughs. They are the boroughs. And while this is fantasy, Jemison riffed off a phenomenon present in reality. At least it’s real for me.
I’ve come to think of communities as living organisms. They are shaped by a variety of humans that change with time, people who have their own sense of personal style and creative tastes — their own needs and dreams.
Nostalgia and Celebrations
We may mourn the loss of certain eras in the history of a community. This might involve the closing of a favorite barber shop. Or we see a section of town suddenly get harder, darker, as economic downturns hit — or pandemics. Maybe new sorts of oddball characters come to town that make us uncomfortable. Perhaps our town was destroyed by flooding from hurricanes. I can empathize with almost every one of those reasons for sadness — or (in the case of disasters) trauma.
But there’s another way to consider some of this. If we think of communities as organic — breathing, human worlds — then we have to respond to some forms of radical transformation with a sense of optimism. The changes show how much life there is in a community, how much rejuvenation can come to buildings or neighborhoods when they become downtrodden. And if we don’t like how things have changed, we have to realize that they’ll change again, maybe for the better.
So, I celebrate Meg and all the newcomers who make up the business section of Franklin. (Who knew it would have a thriving restaurant with chefs that specialize in Turkish, Malay, Indian and Mediterrean cuisine? Another mind exploder when I first found out about it.)
In Franklin last weekend, I visited some family graves in the Ouleout Valley Cemetery. Needed to see which ones needed cleaning, in advance of placing an order with a cemetery fundraising committee to scrub them up. And I wanted to say, “hello.” It was my father’s birthday. He would have turned 100 on that day, if he were still living.
Later, as I passed by the cemetery again on my way home to New York, it seemed to me that its location on the edge of town couldn’t have been more perfect. The white monuments and gravestones stretch out like open arms along a green rise. The series of thin roads drawn out between them remind me of old-fashioned penmanship in autograph books.
As I rode by, it almost seemed like the forebearers in Franklin were greeting all the travelers like me with the silent message: “We are who this village was. Wait until you see what it’s become.”
