THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, October 26, 1996 TAG: 9610260010
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A15 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: OPINION
SOURCE: KERRY DOUGHERTY
LENGTH: 76 lines
An advertisement that ran in this newspaper last week featured a bleak black-and-white sketch of a woman embracing a teen-age boy.
``When you send your children to college, kiss 'em goodbye forever,'' warned the ad by Forward Hampton Roads, a group of businessmen interested in economic development through regional cooperation.
The point of the ad was that jobs are so low-paying here and the future so gloomy, that well-educated young people are settling in other areas where the job market is better. Places like Charlotte. And Atlanta. Even Richmond.
The ad caught my attention. But there was a time when I would have shrugged it off. I went away to college at 17, fleeing my native New Jersey and its rotting rust-belt economy in the process. I swore I'd never go back except to visit, and I never have.
But as a middle-aged mother of two, married to a man who also moved some distance from his family, I know firsthand what it's like to raise a family with no close relatives within 300 miles.
It's awfully lonely.
Everywhere I go I seem to see women my age with older women - their mothers. Shopping together, having lunch, going to movies, doing simple things that are so natural they never give them a thought. But these are the small things you cannot do if you live a day's drive from your parents.
Grandchildren suffer, too. Friends of my children sleep at their grandparents' houses on Saturday nights. And grandparents cheer for them on the sidelines at soccer games. For my children, a visit with Grandma and Grandpa means at least a week away from home. And we mail the grandparents photos of soccer games and swim meets.
But I feel the effects of living far from family most keenly on Sunday afternoons. That was when we always had an elaborate dinner with my grandmother, my aunts, uncles and cousins. There was too much food (too much cholesterol, too, but who knew) and I couldn't wait to shed my Sunday finery when it was over. But we were family and this is what ours did each week. And it was at my grandmother's worn mahogany table that I learned who I was and where I came from.
During those noisy Sunday dinners I heard the family stories - again and again. The tragic and the funny and stories we knew went no further than family. Stories told and retold by the Irish raconteurs and crazy eccentrics who populated our family in great numbers.
There were whispered conversations around the sink after dinner - of a cousin in New York in love with a priest, of another in trouble with the law.
Standing beside me holding her dish towel was Aunt Agnes who blathered incessantly about ``The Rev. Dr. Billy Graham.''
And grumbling in another room was my mother's mother who never believed we actually sent a man to the moon. She believed in astronauts, however. She blamed them for every cataclysmic weather event that happened. ``Men in outer space,'' she'd say upon hearing about a freak hailstorm.
The stories were often tiresome and peppered with lots of bickering. But underlying it all was the bond of family that for a time was stronger than the steel cable the men made during the week. Those ties held us together as we sat shoulder to shoulder around a too-small dining room table in a cramped Trenton house every Sunday, just being family.
After dinner came the obligatory Sunday drive which somehow always passed by the bridge across the Delaware River which boldly proclaimed in red neon letters 20 feet high: ``Trenton Makes The World Takes.''
That sign is still there today, aglow with irony. Not a word of the slogan is true anymore. Trenton makes nothing and its best days were a generation ago when America's steel industry was booming and good-paying jobs were plentiful along the river.
Back then Trenton was a place people came to, not ran away from.
The ad by Forward Hampton Roads brought all this into focus for me. It is apparent that if local leaders don't come together to plan for the future and find a way to lure good businesses to the area, young people will remember Hampton Roads as the place where they grew up and then left to make a new life somewhere else. Among strangers.
That would be a terrible loss for Hampton Roads - and for all of its families. MEMO: Ms. Dougherty is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB