OutTakes
Commentary by Edd Merritt,
September 8, 2011, page 14.....

A Change at Spear’s Corner Store

Oh there been times I thought I couldn’t last for long
But now I think I’m able to carry on
It’s been a long time, a long time comin’
But I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will.
Sam Cooke – A Change is Gonna Come

Despite our wish for things to remain unchanged for eternity, they seldom do. I’m a slow learner, and it took me longer than usual to recognize the latest change. But there it stands (er, rather, there it sits) in Spear’s Corner Store, East Charlotte Village.
Hardly drastic, it nonetheless made me realize how we use artifacts to interpret our culture. The change was the simple act of moving the store’s cash register about five feet closer to the door and sending the freezer box to the far end of the counter.
Whoa, you say. Drum roll; marching bands; fireworks.
Well, not quite. Although, given the nature of news in the national press recently, this might be worthy of a spot in the feature section of the New York Times.
The major impact of the new store design is on community culture. To learn what’s hot on the burner in town, I now have to alter my method of inquiry. It’s a helpful lesson for us newspaper folks. It keeps us on our inquisitive toes.
Do you remember the single chair that used to sit facing Spear’s counter where some of the world-class Sudoku tournaments took place? It met your eye the minute you entered the store. I called it the “throne.” Often a neighborhood regular was perched on it, describing something that recently happened in the village or pontificating on the sad state of government or carrying on a conversation with Carrie Spear about recent bouts with bees or the coyotes that kept him up at night or the corn that required a chain saw to cut. And, if you didn’t agree with what the throne-sitter said, you waited your turn for rebuttal in the bullpen across the aisle. Rules were rules after all, and you couldn’t attach yourself to either seat without coffee and a donut.
Well, the throne is now a stool.
The conversation space has moved to the opposite end of the room and now surrounds a table. It’s actually more comfortable and out of the traffic from those customers who simply want to pay their bills and move on.
However, we who use our time there to study and learn about the community now have to shift our approach and refocus our attention. A friend of mine made a lifelong study of paradigms and paradigm shifts. Moving the “throne” was such a shift. In fact, he’d have a ball at Carrie’s.
Ms. Spear initiated the latest paradigm shift, and although our Nimbys don’t like clouds of change to rain on their parades, it does happen occasionally. It took me awhile to realize what it meant to my morning ritual. I go down the hill every day to collect my papers and catch up on gossip.
Fortunately, the regular bearers of information still patronize Spear’s. To lose them and to lose the ambiance of the general store would be a true disaster. To shift our center place of conversation, though, is like a breath of fresh air. It might, in fact, engender new ideas, new topics for discussion or new views on the East Charlotte universe.
There are increasingly fewer spaces where a person can feel comfortable to walk through the door and immediately test an idea that he had on the drive over. I happen to believe that this is an important element of a community – a place where we feel safe to say things that we might not utter elsewhere.
Granted, community also means we are close enough to others to feel as though we’re under the scrutiny of the microscope. But, the alternative to that – isolation – is something that I find increasingly distasteful. My mind bubbles over with nearly 70 years’ worth of stuff it’s collected. I also enjoy hearing others’ takes on life, the world and everything. My young friend Marie, who enthralled me by describing her first loose tooth the other day, always has something to say with unbridled enthusiasm. I hope she never loses the trait – or if it does ebb a bit during those tough pubescent years, that she regains it just as quickly.
Social interaction, public television informs me, is something dating back millions of years and came about as a necessary element of nature if our species was to prosper.
The fact that it continues, that fortunately we’ve advanced from killing rhinos with stones, gives humanity a continuing thread of development and me a faith in the species. Even if we become James Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand and lose the mechanics that drive us currently, I would hope I could find that hand within easy reach. After all, it is people gathering together that gives meaning to otherwise naked existence. Call it Grover’s Corners; call it Union Grove; call it East Charlotte. Just give me a stool on which to perch, and I’ll be happy as a heron in a lily pond.