Moving On

We are leaving a place and we are happy to be doing so, and it’s about time.

We won’t deny that some happiness happened in this place, even some life-changing occurrences and decisions.

But this has been, for the most part, a place of violence and brutality, of anger and low blows and big blows and blowhards, of racism and condoned mean-spiritedness, a place of disruption and dishonesty, disappointment and dashed dreams, a place where nearly every hint of optimism has been undermined by self-serving actions and arrogant entitlement.

And, so, we are eager to turn our backs on this place ­– this year called 2012 – and open the door to the next place, known as 2013.

But such places of time have a way of lingering; we can expect the scent of 2012 to continue to waft into the freshly painted rooms of 2013. Just when you think 2013 is going to be a new and different dwelling place, that will be a note from 2012 being slipped under the door. And don’t pick up that ringing phone ­–  it’s a robocall from down the hall.

We can hope that 2013 will be rich in arslocii. But most places are just places like other places, and the only art is what you bring to it.

But keep your eyes open, and your heart, as well, because the most potent moments of discovering placeness often happen when you least expect them, and just a few can make a year a place you’ll want to revisit from time to time.

A Convenience Truth

When I moved to the city, the idea was, as urban-planning professionals keep telling us, that the clustering of services and housing for the many on a condensed footprint is the rational way to live. I guess that I interpreted this concept as convenience. A dense neighborhood, close to amenities – how could that be bad? The city neighborhood we chose to inhabit, at that time, was down on its luck (otherwise, how could we have afforded it?), but it was convenient: to transportation, to supermarkets, to the downtown center (only six miles) and to the most natural portion of the municipal park system. It seemed to have it all. We could walk to two supermarkets, never mind that the closest of the two never had anything besides toilet paper that we were looking for and the other, a mile’s walk one way, had possibly three things that we wanted.

There were two shopping district streets about a half-mile or less walk, one up the hill from our street and the other down. The upper one was quaint, sort of behind the times, but it had services like hardware stores, banks, real-estate offices with notaries, a card shop, shoe stores, etc. The lower one was on the skids, with many boarded-up storefronts, too many bars, a plumbing supply and a roofing supply. But a new wave of people saw opportunity there, and some trendy restaurants opened and, eventually, they were followed by antiques, boutiques, galleries and designer-kitchen shops. It was new and exciting, at first, to see life where there had been cobwebs, but the downside was twofold. As the lower street gentrified, it killed off the upper street, which now looks as shantytown-ish as the latter had been before its makeover. And, because of the trendiness factor, people came from everywhere to see the lower street and, as a result,  more and more restaurants and bars opened – more expensive versions of what had been. The clientele kept getting younger and younger, and drank more and more. Some of the restaurants gave way to bars, and the whole street became a college-student drinking mall. More students, more cars. A 19th-century mill town became an SUV parking lot, and all the barflies ended up drunk and disorderly on the streets at 2 am. Not terribly convenient.

One appeal of this neighborhood is that it had some greenspace left, unlike some of the other residential areas in the city. That was probably because of the neighborhood’s topography of steep hills, rendering some sites difficult to put a structure on. Not anymore. Now every scrap of open land, no matter the slope or narrowness or absurdity of building upon it, either has been or is being built on. In addition to the number of vehicles reducing two-lane streets to one, the number of houses are choking the life out of the blocks and making the same damn canyons that kept us from choosing other neighborhoods over this one. Very inconvenient.

When I go downtown into the city’s center, I notice very nice houses, cheek to jowl (well, they are rowhouses), now with 20-story high-rises built right next door, and where open space means having a parking lot with a hundred cars in it at any given time. Because of a lack of yards, often these houses will have decks on their second or third floors. Of course, the sky is open but everything else feels so confining, surrounded by building facades, backs of restaurants and their Dumpsters and exhaust fans, or the exquisite view of blacktop and cars that resembles the shipping port’s cargo holding lots. Yes, owners can walk to a number of amenities from such houses, but do they? Or do they feel as prisoners in their lofty towers? I feel a bit imprisoned in my house; not that I am afraid but, rather, it is uncomfortable to be outside among the whooping denizens.

I think that one has to give up many lifestyle conveniences to live conveniently. There are so many tradeoffs. What is convenient about having to have bars on your doors and windows? Or to live in a cloud of exhaust fumes day in, day out? Or to hear the incessant sounds of humans and machines without respite?

We have recently decided to live in a more rural town. We haven’t made the physical move yet, but the process of weighing and comparisons are inevitable. In a more sparsely populated area, the conveniences are fewer but so are the inconveniences of civilization. Being able to breathe – not only spatially, but to inhale the scent of pine, wood fires, rushing creeks and mountain air. These are conveniences, too. Watching bunnies play, having wild turkeys poke around in the meadow, listening to the sound of the stream and, at first, thinking that its whooshing sound is that of a highway but, no, it is water! These are not the usual conveniences we are taught to appreciate, but these are the ones we instantly, instinctually respond to; we just don’t think of them as conveniences, merely nature. And then there is the very real convenience of feeling like you can go outside on your own property and not be stepping on someone else’s turf, or even having to look at or hear someone else’s assertion of his or her presence. Yes, there are neighbors, but they are both near and far, not so close that you can’t escape them. And if you want to rub elbows with others, walk a few blocks into the town center, but leave it behind when you have quenched your thirst.

Convenience can have many meanings, I am beginning to see. Maybe it can also be a state of not having so much within your reach; enough but not over-the-top too much, and having the convenience of savoring the moment.

Merry Memory, and Many Happy Returns

Life is portable; the past is anchored, and memory is its unreliable Boswell, an attempt at history that, strangely, over time, becomes less witness than hearsay, or myth.

One can enter memory in much the same fashion that one finds his way to and into a familiar room with the lights out, where one knows where to sit and what generalized forms and specific objects he will be able to make out, more or less, as his eyes adjust.

Memory is not a process, or a state; memory is a place. But, unlike the idea of place that we know in the physical world – where you go somewhere to find yourself in it – memory is also a place that can come to you, even unbidden.

We are, all of us, in a memory time of year – for everyone, holidays and rituals based knowingly or not on the return of the light loom large, and we cannot help but flash back to times when life seemed happier or simpler or more understandable; when families were full and there were no gaps; when memories were being made, not being recalled. It is, personally, a memory time because it was in mid-December, more than two decades ago, that a handful of wonderful beings entered our lives, changing them forever, and, later, at other times, in separate memory rooms, departed. Then, too, as we struggle to disassemble a loved house and move much of it to the next place we call home, memory is the 300-lb. gorilla that is the room. Everywhere we turn, the place we are viewing dissolves, and for a moment (a split-moment? no time at all?) we are in the same place but on a different plane, involved in a collision in which where becomes when.

And as we take furniture and personal possessions to the new place – leaving voids for memory to fill, and anti-matter spaces that have spectral solidity, like phantom limbs ­– it is for more than mere practicality that we do so, more than just to avoid having to lay out the money for a new chair when we have a perfectly good one (or two, or five) already available, and appropriate. Part, if not much, of the reason we take our stuff with us is that these things are time machines – by merely keeping them near, and occasionally giving them some attention, they take us to places of memory.

The odd or wondrous thing about memory is that it is not static – it is cumulative, and discriminating. For, given a sufficient amount of time, the older memory fades as newly minted memories cling to object and place, and new myths are born, burnished and held to the heart.

This holiday season, then, it is not necessary to bodily travel to be somewhere else and to be in the presence of those you love – just look around at where you are, and allow yourself to be taken to where you’ve been when you were here before. But don’t dwell too long, or cling to that place. So long as you are you, it will always be there, and at the moment you need it, somehow, in your hand, you will find the key, and know the way, and you will feel the power of its placeness. And you will feel at home.

A Little Light Music

Here we are, well into the free-fall frenzy of the final month of the year, the now super-sized holiday season that appears to be a whopping two months long instead of what used to be individual days separated by weeks of ordinary days. Growing up in my house, there was a a polar oppositeness in the recognition and observation of holidays. Dad was more of a humbug guy and, other than enjoying the fruits of all the womenfolks’ labors that resulted in a cornucopia of plenty to savor, he would have preferred to continue his daily routine uninterrupted by such unnecessary rituals.

Mom, on the other hand, believed in the magic bestowed upon special days. Probably a little too much, but maybe it was her way of trying to tip the balance from Dad’s point of view. Or maybe she just preferred fantasy. The downside of holidays is having too much expectation and always being disappointed in the reality. Between the two of them, she was likely the most unhappy as a result of holiday cheer; and, despite the evidence to the contrary, her hope sprang eternal.

Their children, as an offshoot of this bipolar environment, chose to reject traditional holidays and their underpinnings – much like Dad did – but, rather, decided to find magic in the real as opposed to the fictitious – a healthier Mom. What this means is that we resist the relentless reminders of “the season” and try to avoid the persistent false advertising about the Dickensian ideal of good will and peace on earth. No matter how many thousands of these observations of a single day or groups of days we have, as a species, it seems we are no closer to reaching the more perfect union that the holidays encourage us to seek.

We know from whence it came: we are the primitives in our caves, winter and darkness biting at our frozen digits. It must have felt like the world was ending, the sun sneaking away to warm other creatures that we didn’t know existed over the horizon. We needed some sort of story to comfort us, a way of repeating the fear – of owning it – and keeping in mind that there is hope for the return of the light. It is a primal story, and it has been molded into many variations by different sects; but, even though these groups interpret their stories in their unique tellings, it is still about the light.

This holiday is about the Winter Solstice, no matter how far afield the explanations stray. It’s funny how a natural phenomenon, so basic and so real and having such immense impact, can be interpreted in such fantastical ways. There is the physical-science explanation; the cosmic, spiritual connotations; the religious-story overlays; the familial-bonding imperative; and the commercialism spin – the Winter Solstice has become a growth industry. All these things exist otherwise, but for some reason the Winter Solstice has had to carry the load, becoming all things to all at the end of the calendar year, and being buried in there somewhere in the rubble.

I celebrate the Winter Solstice as a jumping-off point, an end to one period and the start of a new one, a cyclical reminder of nature and life, darkness and light, beginnings and endings. It is, for me, a time of reflection. A time to slow down and think about the year past and the year ahead. And even though we now know that the light will be returning, most assuredly, we must not take that for granted. Ever. It is the gift for the season and it costs nothing. Happy Winter Solstice to the entire Northern Hemisphere! That’s something to celebrate.