Notes from my Knapsack 6-23-22

Notes from my Knapsack 6-23-22
Jeff Gill

Preservation and conservation
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So we're all agreed our community is going to change.

Growth is change. No doubt about that. If you raise kids, you know you have to buy pants at certain times with an eye to how quickly they'll be outgrown, fashion trends notwithstanding.

And time is change, with erosion and decay and fading all part of the process; entropy will have its way and stuff has to be painted or replaced or tossed out with the trash.

As far as I can tell with basic internet searches, we're still thinking the human body, most of it anyhow, "turns over" every seven years or so. The material of which we're made today will by 2029 be new stuff, and here's the bad news: it will be made up of the stuff you decide to eat and drink in those intervening seven years. Hmmm.

Plus aging, et cetera, so we have a concept called life spans, generations, and for each of us, we have only so long, and perhaps pass along through children and students and associates what we hold dear beyond our life span, but after that it's the work of another.

If so the human life span, likewise the arc of a community. The material expression of it in buildings and roads and infrastructure, walls and signs and pipes and wires, all have a life span, wearing out and breaking down if you let it go long enough. Newark is going through a cycle of storm sewer replacement where in some places around Courthouse Square they've found brick vaults and ceramic tile going back over a hundred years, all of it starting to collapse and needing renewal if not replacement.

We also have the intangible infrastructure: ordinances and covenants and building code, strategic plans written decades ago based on laws sometimes a century or more in vintage, and not unlike our built environment, it can erode over time, and need renewal if not wholesale replacement. You can do it on a cycle, watch for emergent needs, or wait for a collapse in the pavement, literal or civic, to force everyone to jump into the hole and rebuild.

Similarly, if a body is made up of cells, a community is made up of people, and like those cells turning over year by year, we see certain roles and officials change even as the functions remain the same. Denison University is on its twentieth president; with each administration, some things change while much remains the same. Mayors and council members, village staff and volunteer officials, all partake of the same changing but changeless nature.

When you put an organism under stress, adolescence being one kind of pressure with fast growth and internal changes, the entire system has to adapt. From the immune system to the prefrontal cortex, the long bones extending and baby teeth falling out, just to stay yourself everything has to change.

Or to be very specific, soon we have the annual Fourth of July Parade in Granville. Every year it's the same; every year it is completely different. Some of the banners and vehicles, even a few people persist from year to year, but that same ol' parade? It takes quite a bit of intentional planning and effort to look just the same as it always has.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a regular role in certain parades, as well. Give him a wave on the Fourth, or through knapsack77@gmail.com as well as on Twitter @Knapsack.