Life Happens On Main Street

To the Editor:

Those of us who live on Main Street (north and south of the flag pole) take pride in our homes, our street, and the quality of our neighbors. We enjoy the prominent role our neighborhood plays in the town’s cultural life. On numerous holidays and weekends throughout the year, such as Labor Day, Halloween, and the first weekend of December, all of us do what we can to welcome the townspeople and make their visit memorable. We’re happy to do it.

We don’t write letters about the litter that is thoughtlessly left behind after a movie or a parade, about the cost of bringing a smile to the face of a thousand trick-or-treaters, about the cars that carelessly speed down our street, the weekend warriors throttling their home-equity Harleys past our homes on Sundays, or the fact that most Friday evenings parents drop off their adolescent children to hang out in front of Edmond Town Hall and the surrounding sidewalks (north of the flag pole). We knew about all of this and accepted it as part and parcel of the sublime pleasures and responsibilities of living on this antique street in the heart of town.

Main Street is indeed the showplace of Newtown, but it is something else, also. It is a street where good people live 365 days a year, a residential neighborhood where just like any other in Newtown, we all do our best to get by. Sometimes a house doesn’t get painted the year it ought to; children leave their toys out front instead of putting them away; dogs foolishly bark. Life happens here just as it does in any other neighborhood in Newtown, and if our lives and homes aren’t always like pictures in a pretty book, that’s our business. Our performance as homeowners is not fair game for malice and criticism on the letters-to-the-editor page of the community newspaper.

If the view of Main Street north of the flagpole continues to offend Tine Hoffmeister, we offer her some simple directions. When you get to the flag pole, take a left and head south. Then keep going.

Karen Boyle

Mark Poirier

53 Main Street, Newtown                                          October 17, 2005