Time Travels

Besides all the food (hold the squash, thank you), all the football, all the phone calls to relatives and, today, the seasonal start of all the shopping for that upcoming holiday, Thanksgiving weekend is traditionally a time when our minds drift back to Home, meaning not so much a particular house in our life as a particular place in our time. Propelled by the evocative aromas and tastes of familiar foods, the comfortable details of familiar stories shared annually by the same people, and the enfolding warmth of families and friends and the enduring memories they generate, we travel to another time and place, even if only in our minds. It’s comforting. Even without “recent events.”

For a majority of Americans, where they are now is not where they started. Ours has been a restless nation that admires and seeks mobility of all kinds: social, physical, financial. Movement--traveling to new places, new lives, thoughts and goals, new affluence, adventures and ambitions--has been a prominent characteristic of American life and a major theme in its literature, music and movies. Alas, little attention gets lavished on the places and people left behind. We were reminded of that the other day through the warm and intriguing Times story by Stephanie Simon on Pretty Prairie, Kan. She described the Kansas Explorers Club, a well-meaning band of citizens finding, chronicling, celebrating and supporting the unique, even quaint features of the region’s troubled small towns, which so many Americans grew up in and left. Now emptied of much opportunity and many young people, these communities struggle to survive.

The American heartland was not named by accident. For generations its vast fields and towns have produced the foods and hard-working people that went out to feed, populate and help drive much of the country and parts of the world. This regional reservoir of both bodily nutrition and enduring human values has been hollowed out especially during the last generation as the Darwinian rules of modern banking, global markets and massive, mechanized agriculture took their toll on a traditional way of life and increasingly feeble local economies. The 80%-plus of Americans who now live in urban and suburban encampments need not move to rural regions to sense both their countrymen’s pain and the importance of rural values to a balanced national life.

Television’s “The Muppet Show” once had an affecting episode that revolved around the funny, fuzzy characters joyously celebrating the departure of Gonzo, the raspy-voiced, blue-beaked fowl who had finally achieved his lifelong ambition to direct movies in Bombay. Surprisingly, however, Gonzo grew sadder as the celebration progressed. His Muppet pals asked why. “Oh, I want to go there,” the big-eyed Gonzo said, “I just don’t want to leave here.” Given this fall’s events and the understandable desire of many Americans to stay where they are on this weekend so associated with going back home, little Gonzo, it seems, was presciently speaking for many of us.