Wall Street Journal columnist Gwendolyn Bounds took a major detour from the fast-paced life of a financial editor in Manhattan after the crushing September 11 collapse of the Twin Towers close to her city apartment.
Who could blame her? Spotting her book Little Chapel on the River while having a browse in the bookstore a couple of weeks back, I was easily lured by the simple subtitle A Pub, A Town and the Search for What Matters Most.
To quote Bill Bryson, "I'm a Stranger Here Myself." Though we all find our way home eventually, or would like to hope we do. Oftentimes 'home' is not exactly where we'd expect it to be.
Bounds recreates the first couple of years after the terrorist attacks as she rebuilds her confidence in her surrounds and discovers another side of herself within a small, tight-knit community of incredibly hospitable, Irish immigrants and their colorful, extended family.
The Guinans are legendary in the Hudson Valley community of Garrison, New York. But living history can only hang on for so long and as the pages turn on Little Chapel on the River, so does the passage of changing times.
It was a compelling read for me and extremely emotive as I was raised within a fairly remote, small-town community myself and fully comprehend the familial instinct to preserve tradition in a multi-generational mom and pop service industry such as Guinan's small-town shop and bar.
My Grandfather was a green grocer, small-town property developer in the old-fashioned sense that nothing much changed for decades after decades. Only when my Dad and my Uncle raised sufficient rucus to reign him in and allow them to make much needed tweeks to the family business did he faintly bow to their requests.
When my Dad sold his business after fifty plus years behind the counter selling newspapers from six in the morning, seven days a week, my siblings and I mourned the loss of the much-loved corner stores, newsagents and at one time, pet store, supermarket and laundry.
Liberated, my Dad has gone on to discover the pleasures of part-time driving jobs, tootling around the Fenlands in his late sixties, taking in the landscape and the never ending horizon he was shut away from in a relentless, shopkeepers' strict schedule for the bulk of his adult life. Change can be painful and sad. Change can be a release. But change will inevitably come around one way or another.
The Guinan legacy will live on through Bounds book and in the generations of Garrison residents who will remember the good old days as long as they themselves are a part of the rich fabric of this small community.
Jim Guinan, proprietor of the Little Chapel on the River passed away April 1st, the day before I bought this book. I hadn't looked online for a real-time update until starting to write this review. RIP JG. And thanks to Gwendolyn Bounds for bringing me home for the duration of her book!