The Concord Bookshop, Concord, Massachusetts 

Having led a somewhat unrooted life in my younger days and having willingly uprooted myself from my native land some forty years ago, I have found myself more than invested of late in the whole idea of "community".  Somewhat unoriginally perhaps, I have come to believe a community is where people know your name and you know theirs. You know their stories, they yours, and over time the threads of these stories become interwoven, linked, they become part of the fabric of your life.     

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As soon as I walked into the Concord Bookshop, I heard my name. It was Deb, a friend for some twenty years, a jeweler with a studio at the Emerson Umbrella (our arts center, with its own remarkable story) just down the street.  We talked about our kids (three between us, all girls), about books, about our plans for Thanksgiving.

We moved down an aisle to chat with some women setting up a display off to one side. These were the Alcott moms, working to support the library at one of our elementary schools. For this annual event, the Concord Bookshop donates 10% of all its sales proceeds for the day. The place would soon be hopping. A previous generation of Alcott moms figures in my own story.

The Concord Bookshop has been a part of life in Concord for almost seventy years. It is still owned by the same three local families who founded it. In my time, there have been only two managers:  Dale, who was there for eighteen years and is now at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, another great bookstore, and John. They, and the entire staff, are book people: they read and know books.

In a town that justifiably reveres its authors -- Thoreau, Emerson, Alcott(s), Hawthorne and more -- the Bookshop sets aside an entire section prominently for contemporary local authors. These include such illustrious names as Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jane Langton, Alan Lightman, David Sibley -- but also such lesser lights as yours truly and other first-timers, whose books they seem genuinely fond of promoting.

And I must not forget their Bookbucks (1 buck for $20 purchase). These are more than stocking stuffers. They are passed on to one's kids, who, at least in our case, dutifully nurture them till they have enough for a book they can buy on their own to read and add to their shelves. And so the Bookshop lives on in our lives. For now.

What if in the cold calculus of "market economics" it were to die? Before we answer, I want to introduce you to four more stores -- and I could tell you the stories of a dozen others -- within a block of each other in Concord Center (it is only about three blocks long, but the alleys are worth exploring).

Anderson Photo                                                                                     Sally Ann's Bakery

Fritz and Gigi (Kussin's)                                                 Vanderhoof 's Hardware                                  

Anderson Photo has been a local family business for 60 years. Lynda runs it today.  Bill, master baker and now owner, has been at Sally Ann's Bakery for as long as I remember.  Fritz and Gigi , the children's clothing store (everyone still calls it Kussin's) is celebrating its 70th year, now in the hands of  Louisa and Karen, the third generation. And Vanderhoof's Hardware is the daddy of them all, in the same family for 104 years, with present owner Scott in charge.

All these businesses are probably under stress, some significantly, due to "market forces" and especially today because of the general economy.  Why should we care (other than some perfunctory compassion for people who have lost their livelihoods and so forth) if they perish?

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We generally do not choose the country we live in, present company excepted. In any case, our ability to affect the larger environment, global or national, is limited at best. But especially as adults with a certain mobility we can and do choose the communities we live in, bring our children up in, grow old and perhaps die in. 

Unless we are total recluses, it is here we are recognized and we recognize others. This is part of the validation of our state of being (ontology, for the more philosophically inclined). There is a spatial dimension to this as well. The store fronts, the church, the school, the playground are physical markers of that state. Lose any of it, allow them to deteriorate or disappear, part of us is lost as well.

My nephew grew up in Battery Park in New York City.  Like many NYC kids, he'd been taking the subway on his own to school since he was twelve or thirteen. His mother had told him if the subways or buses didn't work to make for the World Trade Center towers, that way he would never get lost. The day after 9/11 (he was fifteen then) he asked his mom: "How will I find my way home now?"

                                ____________________________

Fifteen years ago I had my seemingly obligatory (first) bout with cancer (oncology as ontology, perhaps).  The church ladies and our friends along with the then somewhat sparse Indian community enveloped us with love and food. Among them were Deb and a prior generation of Alcott moms. And while I can never look chicken or lasagna in the face any more, they also brought us  Bill's herb bread (Tuesdays only). It got devoured, mouth sores be damned.

I was supposed to walk. One of the first after rather prolonged and somewhat debilitating chemo was with our daughter, Sally Ann's cookies in hand, walking past the old graveyard (the one right on Main Street, not the more famous Sleepy Hollow Cemetery with Authors Ridge).  She would always walk on the wall ("It's called a haha, Mama"), describing each stone she stepped on -- "rounded", "curved", "jagged", "erose"  (a seven-year old saying "erose"? Concord Bookshop has much to answer for) -- till we got to the Mill Brook and played Pooh sticks. She was wearing a Kussin's dress that day. We still have the pictures, developed and printed by Anderson Photo.

So I have little patience with those who callously suggest in some misguided form of social Darwinism  that these businesses be allowed to "fail". Whose failure will it be? These people touch us and benefit us and keep us whole in ways both personal and communal and their deaths would leave holes in the bodies of our community and our own. I have written earlier about the disappearance of a community twelve thousand miles distant beset by unfeeling, unfair exogenous forces. In the USA, the consequences of the demise of small, independent, locally owned businesses may not seem as dire, but all of us would be diminished as well.