Just recently, the following comment arrived in response to the story “Let’s Go Shopping.”  It’s currently at the bottom of all the comments posted at the end of the story.  I repeat it here because it raises a very interesting point:

You’d be surprised at the many shops that have opened. We have 4 bakers in the Market House. I encourage you to check out the Facebook pages, Sunbury informed and beyond and Old Towne Neighborhood Group. They won’t be the memories of your childhood, but hopefully we are building toward a place that can be another generation of children’s positive memories…

Because I haven’t been back to Sunbury since July 2017, I most certainly would be pleasantly surprised.  And it’s all to the good that this gives people hope.  Is it the beginning of a renaissance?  Time will tell.

I began this website and wrote all the stories to try and go beyond the nostalgia of just showing pictures of “the way we were.”  Of course, that kind of documentation is necessary.  But I wanted more.  I wanted to describe how we felt, what we did day to day, how and with whom we interacted as we went about our daily lives.  What was it like to LIVE in Sunbury in the 50s and 60s?  For example: my pictures of old steam engines can be fascinating.  I wanted to describe what it was like to be hiding in a sumac patch only ten feet away from one as it sat just off the Shamokin Creek bridge at the east end of town literally breathing as if it was alive.  I wanted to tell those stories because everything that made up the FABRIC back then is gone.  I somehow wanted to preserve and tell others because I saw first-hand in 2017 the loss of what Louis Bromfield called “the sense of continuity and the permanence of small things.”

Those “small things” are so fragile, they’re easily lost in the collective memory of a place.  It wasn’t enough for me to post pictures on a Facebook page.  To borrow a phrase, I wanted to convey “the agony and the ecstasy” of growing up in what I truly believe was a great example of small town America.  It’s a world that’s gone forever.  You can build something else, as the commenter above stresses, but it won’t be “the way we were.”  I hope that learning a little about the way it was helps build something new that doesn’t lose the vitally important humanity of what has gone before.