Heavenly Hash?

Plymouth for me is an abstraction, like the four-foot ice cream cone on top of Gellar’s in Manomet.
It’s not a particularly well-designed cone, and I certainly know that if I had the chance to give it a big lick I would not be pleased with its metallic taste – but it represents an ideal worthy of my aspirations.

I think we all carry around images of an ideal Plymouth, and often find it difficult to reconcile those images with the reality we see every day.

The First Church of Nostalgia:

Many ‘townies’ see Plymouth through the prism of the past. 100 years or so ago the town was still a collection of neighborhoods and villages- each truly separate and unique. There was by necessity, in those days, greater self-sufficiency and, paradoxically, a resulting closeness.
The core of those old neighborhoods still exists today- at least physically, but they are no longer completely distinct and separate from the town, except in the memories of our oldest residents.

Beach Stickers and Bonfires:

To some degree the nostalgic vision of old Plymouth –and perhaps the general notion of the ‘New England Village’, was responsible for the next wave of residents who came here. They didn’t know the old neighborhoods, or recognize them as distinct and separate, but they accepted the vision of a community which offered a certain quality of life that they wanted to participate in – either on a temporary ‘summer’ basis, or year-round: never mind that by moving here in large numbers they were necessarily changing what they found most appealing about the area.

Single Family Homeys:

For the next wave of residents –in which I include myself, the appeal of Plymouth as an historic entity or quaint New England village was not, at least initially, particularly important –especially considering that for people looking for their first home it seemed that the tighter grasp a town had on its past, the higher the cost of their property. No, Plymouth’s greatest appeal to those who came here from the Sixties on was, I believe, the basic notion of affordability. Instead of the corner store, we looked for two full baths. Instead of a town green, we asked for 1000 square feet of sod.

Mock Apple Pie

And finally, or at least most recently, are those who have come to Plymouth for the golf, or the après-golf, and who live in someone else’s idea of the perfect retirement community – developments that have almost nothing to do with the historic or imagined Plymouth but in their own way represent an ideal.

I guess what I am getting at is that we all have these ‘visions’ of Plymouth that are often odds with one another, and with reality. Even my vision of a Plymouth is such a stereotype. People are always more complex than we imagine.
We hold on to these mental images though because like all stereotypes, they offer the fantasy of a simple, manageable world. That’s usually a harmless thing, except when we insist that everyone else act as if our vision was reality.

I firmly believe that for the town to move forward we have to open our eyes to a far more complex and challenging reality of what Plymouth is, and should be.

Instead of fighting against affordable housing, or trying to restrict who moves to town because of their ‘demographics’, the town should aggressively pursue a mix of development that appeals to the young and old, rich and poor, commuter and retiree.
Instead of holding on to (or creating) imaginary villages, I feel we should be focusing on improving services for all town residents, no matter where they live.
Instead of focusing on the town being simply cheaper for all of its existing residents –and criticizing town officials for any expenditure that impacts the tax rate, we should concentrate on making the town more attractive overall: better schools, smooth, paved roads, well-kept parks and recreational facilities and the like will attract (and keep) a variety of people and businesses in town, and keep our community economically vital.

Admittedly my vision of Plymouth too, is an abstraction: I buy in to the idea of a town that has for nearly 400 years offered the nation a lesson in the benefits of positive civic engagement. That, I agree, hasn’t always been true.
In some ways we’re like that French girl standing in New York Harbor. We’re a four hundred year old electrified ice cream cone that you can see from far out at sea: a cone that no matter what the reality is, is always topped with a scoop of your favorite flavor.