A letter to Columbia: on the matter of her missing anthem


Dear Columbia,
I have been pondering a question that arrived uninvited and has refused to leave, much like an uninvited guest at Christmas: What, precisely, is the song of Columbia?

Many towns have been given their due in verse. Mr. Springsteen, for example, has written of Atlantic City. Mr. Joel sang of Allentown. Even towns smaller and less scenic than ours have found some troubadour willing to immortalize their streets. And yet Columbia still waits for her ballad.

Let us consider, then, what such a song might contain.

It would surely open upon the river herself, the town's leading lady whether she asked for the role or not: vast, shallow, and prone to dramatic flourishes. One does not simply omit the Susquehanna in a Columbia anthem.

Verse two belongs to the town itself, that charm of a place where residents still know one's name and, regrettably, one's business. The antique shops sit hither and yon, but there is a romance to the streets.

And here is where any honest songwriter must lose the rose-colored spectacles in favor of the reading glasses. For no anthem worth its melody should be built on flattery alone.

One cannot sing of small-town charm while humming past the headlines and the unsettling sense that the doors people once left unlocked now require more hardware. A song that mentions only the pretty parts is not an anthem; it is a real estate brochure with a chorus, and this author has no patience for real estate brochures pretending to be poetry.

The true song of Columbia must hold both truths at once: the golden hour light on the river and the harder conversations at borough council; the delight of the Saturday market and the uneasy walk home after dark that too many residents now undertake with caution. The good, the bad, and the occasionally quite ugly, all set to a melody that starts slow and mournful before ascending into something like hope.

Columbia's honest anthem would need the courage to admit that the borough can be both beloved and imperfect, both home and, on certain nights, unnerving, and that loving it means singing the whole verse.

This author now extends the challenge to any composer, poet, or ambitious teenager with a guitar and too much free time: write our anthem. And don't let the final verse pretend the town has no shadows. 

Yours in candor and mild scandal,
Cassandra
 

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