The movers had just unloaded my furniture and Mac and Joe’s
was the only spot I recognized to grab a bite and commence the inevitable
unpacking of Oxford memories born here when I was a student three decades ago. I anticipated ghosts with my coffee.
The news the cat and I were moving our boxes thirty miles
north was greeted by friends and family with mostly wordless stares. Single,
fiftyish, and rebounding to a college town, where the mean age is less than
some bath towels I own, required a rationale I had yet to fully construct.
None the less, I staked out 1,500 sq feet a mile from
Hueston Wood’s back door and a few steps beyond the often annoying
18-year-old’s march into the final stages of frontal lobe development. Student
self actualization is noisy sausage making.
When it’s in your backyard tolerance, patience, and the 1974 memory of
being trapped inside a Candle Wood dumpster are helpful.
As I waited for my apparitions and the hoagie to appear at
my booth, it became clear that in Oxford change is measured in inches, rather than
years. Staring back at me from the front page of the Oxford Press were the same
battles the town was fighting when, with a little coordination, we could flush
the water tower dry.
City Counsel remains locked in its Sisyphean struggle of
meeting the interests of local business, full-time residents and you know
who. The engagements between tradition,
quality of life, and economic survival are being played out in tiny skirmishes
that are perfect digital copies of those when we were still very analog.
Sure, the furniture has been rearranged. Uptown is now a food court. The spring exodus vacuums the square mile
vacant. Sadly, nowadays, it seems the
professors live someplace else. Campus
is in much better shape thanks, in part, to prosperous times for high-flying
alumni done good. But, it’s the same
place. The same maddening challenges.
The same undergraduates in different clothes trying to find their land
legs.
The reason Oxford has avoided the ranks of small towns that have given up is simply because it is fed by a monopoly, a two-hundred year old sagacious institution whose product is contemplation. Out there our commodity is, for most, a luxury item. Here, it is what liberates all of us from the requirements of a more complicated and reactionary world, where the shortest distance is not necessarily a straight line.
Out there small towns disappear into forests of big boxes,
and an urban sprawl that reaches out and drags them into neighborhoods where
they don’t necessarily want to go. Out
there interstates rip through corn fields and open your doors to crowds of
strangers who love your Home Depot, not you.
Oxford doesn’t have on-ramps.
. If you are out there, you don’t
just pass by - you have to want to come here.
Traditionally, we have cautioned our undergrads that their
halcyon days are not to be confused with the real world, where the rules are
murkier and your life’s stakeholders less patient. Out there is your permanent place in the
world, where it costs $11 to park.
Ruth Wells preserves local heritage
Fighting Time!“Too many old people don’t have the gumption to go on” claims Ruth Wells. I don’t want to be like them.”
She’s not.
Wells is 83. And, she adamantly refuses to act her age.
The founder of the Colerain Historical Society is too busy.
piecing together the neighborhoods past; she is too impatient to handle
gracefully those who insist on treating her like a helpless old women.
Although, her mind remains as nimble as middle-aged rug
runners forty years her junior, the octogenarian is battling the physical effects
of so much living.
She curses her ageing body as if it were an old Ford with a
busted transmission. It infuriates her that it is giving up before she is.
She is relentlessly shifting, squirming, and wriggling in
her chair, trying to make peace with a bad hip and other uncooperative bones.
Blind in her left eye, battling glaucoma in the other, she has been unable to
climb the stairs for the last three years. She grudgingly relies on others to
give her and the wheelchair a ride to the store or a trip to her doctor.
Suggest to the widow of 40 years that she move into a retirement home and her eyes spark anger; hands clinch into tiny fists as if she is preparing to teach you a lesson in respect. “I don’t want to be around all those old people,” she pronounces. “It looks like a helluva of a boring place.”
Forget needlepoint and lazy summer evenings at bingo. She
has a newsletter to edit and a new computer she is considering. She rises each
day with the sun in the College Hill home her parents built, when William
Howard Taft was President and Mt Airy Forest was still lush gently rolling farm
land.
The only child of a foundry man chooses to go it alone as
she has much of her life.
Her
husband died in 1950 after a 21-year marriage. Three weeks
after the funeral she enrolled at UC to earn her teaching certificate and
complete her masters degree.
At 45, when most of us are mired in routine, she began a
25-year career in the Cincinnati and Northwest schools. District policy forced
her to retire at 70.
“I would be teaching today if they had let me”, she said. The fists return.
Today, Wells continues an active role as a trustee of the
historical group she founded. Surrounded by volumes of books squeezed into
every inch of available shelf space and countless files stuffed with three
decades of her own research, she begins each morning at the computer recording
the names of pioneers, plotting the locations of long-forgotten buildings built
and razed, and chronicling Indian attacks more than two centuries ago.
She finds it difficult to explain the passion for her work.
At one time or another she helped organize historical societies in Delhi, Green
Townships, Mt. Healthy and College Hill.
She organized the Colerain association in 1964, when she
realized new construction threatened to erase the history of the township. She
believes it, too, faces a race against time. She said unless someone protects
what remains of the past, bulldozers will bury the last evidence of a time and
its people.
When the old Blue Rock Road post office was torn down, it
was Wells who collected planks from the building and had them immortalized into
park benches.
After a Columbus, Ohio developer announced plans to level the Six
Mile Restaurant and build a strip mall, it was the loud and angry voice of
Wells which scared off the prospective buyer and preserved the historic eatery
for another decade.
This summer she is scheduled to enter the hospital for a hip
replacement.
“I wasn’t planning to go the damn grave with plastic in me”, she complains. “And, if that doctor plans on keeping longer than I feel is necessary, I have some news for him right now: I am going back home, whether he wants me to or not.”
To Wells, old age is a nuisance. Nothing
more.
