SAGE ADVICE: The more things change

I most remember him as the uncle who wanted to cut my thumbs off with a fingernail clipper as I stood in my great-grandfather’s kitchen waiting for the ice cream man.
My youngest son will remember him as the man who brought him Subway sandwiches and taught him to play checkers.
A lot changed in the 30 intervening years. My uncle got more gray-headed, for one thing. The ice cream man stopped coming to my great-grandfather’s house. My great-grandfather died. The ice cream man started coming again. (I don’t think it had anything to do with Papaw Boose dying, but you never can be too sure about those sorts of things).
And a lot stayed the same. Or maybe if it didn’t exactly stay the same it swung back around to the same old used to be, like the ice cream man’s sudden reappearance.
Take Andy Griffith. He went off the air on WCYB. But then WDBJ picked him up. Every afternoon, just like when I was a young boy.
Back when I feared for my thumbs, Marion’s downtown was the place to go. Forget Kmart or Roses. We got our cheap toys from the Ben Franklin and our get-back-to-school clothes from the Parks Belk. Main Street was packed with cars similar to my grandfather’s. Sometimes one of them, it seems a lot of times the one we were riding in, would just up and stop. You’d sit there, holding up non-honking traffic, until whatever it was making the vehicle not go stopped. In those days, the 1970s, vehicles had an uncanny ability to heal themselves.
Then, when everyone got vehicles that weren’t so good at fixing problems, Main Street kind of cleared out. It turned into one of those places you walked down only if someone was paying you to do so. For the most part you didn’t even drive through. Interstate 81 got you around the whole mess a lot quicker and a lot less painfully. Back when I worked for the town and after, I was sure that empty place was the downtown Marion I would always know. After all, WDBJ hadn’t picked up Andy Griffith and the ice cream man hadn’t made his triumphant return.
Then something happened. Marion became a place to go again. Its parking spaces filled. It teemed with people, of the honking and non-honking variety. Can’t have everything I suppose.
It happened, oddly enough, with a Wal-Mart right in the middle of town. If you believe all your read, and I don’t, I don’t even believe all I write, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Wal-Mart was supposed to have crippled the already dying, maybe dead, downtown. But Marion is proof-positive that revitalization happens. In spite of what the Arkansas giant might want. In fact, and don’t quote me on this because it falls into one of those things I write that I don’t think I believe, the resurged downtown might end up dealing a death blow to the Wal-Mart. Sure there are plenty of cars out in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart every time I drive through. Even a full half aren’t teenaged cruisers doing the things teen-aged cruisers have done since even before “American Graffiti” came out. But the lot still looks fairly anemic. Meanwhile, downtown is buzzing. There’s music, food and people. More than that, they look happy. Most of them, even those with teenagers sitting over the Wal-Mart parking lot doing the things teenagers have done since before “American Graffiti” came out, are smiling. The people who belong to the cars in the Wal-Mart lot rarely look that way, even if they don’t have any teenagers just across the way.