We often talk about the way smell, music, and even books hold our memories, but there’s also something to be said about place.
I’m thinking of this as I prepare to go to Nashville this weekend. It’s been maybe five years since I’ve been there.
Nashville is significant to me in different ways, I often think of it as a place that marks different chapters in my life. From thinking the Opryland Hotel was the most glamorous place on earth when I was young, it was also the halfway point between my home and my college on the long drive between the two, it’s the place others in my life went and made decisions that impacted me greatly, and it has also often been a place where I sought healing in unlikely times. I used to want to live there, and now I’m surprised in many ways to go back.
You see I’ve been in Southern California so long I know the culture of it is deep in me now. For all of its superficiality, materialism, and individuality, it’s home and those are the devils I know and live with now. There’s something that grates inside of me at the thought of that Bible belt culture I once found comfort in. It’s odd and I’ll be interested to see how the reality is different from what I remember.
But place…place holds memories, too. I realized this when I visited my hometown a few years ago. I was surprised by the way memories swept over me when we turned down a certain street. Like smell or music, it’s a key that unlocks the memories deep inside of us. Not necessarily significant ones, just fragments of the lives we’ve lived. Tiny pieces we thought were gone forever. A conversation, a night out with a friend, a stinging word. I’m interested to see if Nashville will beam its light on these places in my mind and heart I forget are there.
But mostly I’m looking forward to a good weekend of fellowship and friends.
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I just loved this line:
You see I’ve been in Southern California so long I know the culture of it is deep in me now. For all of its superficiality, materialism, and individuality, it’s home and those are the devils I know and live with now.
That’s Chicago for me… and the last three years in Dallas I’ve never become comfortable with the Bible Belt… despite probably being surrounded by far more people like me here than I ever was in Chicago.
It’s a strange place. Glad to see you by the way! Hope you’re well.
I have taken so long to comment back, in part because I was rolling around my own idea of what you said. Having grown up in the army, the ‘places’ in my life are more ephemeral – I mean, I have a sense of place of, say, my mother’s piano, because it came everywhere, and performed the same function in each place. So it is easier for me to connect with individual objects and their owners or inhabitants than a larger place – I cannot really recollect college in that place-sense way, for instance, but I can clearly place a Ginkgo tree I loved on the campus, and the spot in my closet I used to sit in – honestly thinking in larger spaces than that is a wee bit terrifying, I like to have borders and edges that I can feel around me, you know? I was telling someone recently, this is even why I dress the way I do – a button up shirt has a collar, cuffs, then tight dress shoes, to signal the ends of myself, you know? I wear suspenders because they give a sense of constriction, liminality I guess, like ‘this is as far as I stretch when I walk, every thing outside these bands is something else, and safely outside of my inside’ if that makes sense. My desk at work is the same way – I have a cubicle, and I hung an old network cable across the corner of it, and hung some things from it (a christmas ornament, some applique eggs, paperdolls), because it sort of creates the illusion of a ceiling, sort of completes the box of the cube, so there isn’t this open place that I cannot mentally walk to the edge of.