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I Didn’t Take Pictures When I Lived There

I Didn’t Take Pictures When I Lived There

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But I make up for it when I return. It’s the years in the wilderness, the suburban wilderness. They have softened me, I suppose, turned me into a tourist. I snap and snap and don’t care if people think I’m a tourist. I’m easily impressed. I look up.

Every direction is a photograph. The ripple of water in a lagoon, the play of light on a brownstone, the San Remo glimpsed through a screen of bright willow green.

Maybe we should move back to New York, I say to Tom, knowing, before the words leave my mouth, how foolish they sound, the four-bedroom colonial back in Virginia filled to bursting. Knowing that life has taken me far from the person I was when I made my way in Manhattan years ago.

But that’s the point of travel. Possibilities present themselves. Life, in all its fullness, returns.

Walking in the City

Walking in the City

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A walker in the suburbs strolls the streets or ambles through the woods, but her destination is secondary. She walks for the walking and not for where it takes her.

Compare this to a walker in the city, pounding the concrete day after day. Here is walking with purpose, commuting on foot or by subway (which must also be walked to and from); walking to the corner for a newspaper, to the market for a quart of milk. Walking because it’s faster than taking a cab. Walking because, well, it’s just the way you get around. It is the air you breathe; it is the environment.

All this is to say, a walker in the suburbs forgets how much she walked when she lived in the big city. And when she goes back there her feet remind her. Her soul too. It soars.

New Neighborhood

New Neighborhood

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Yesterday, a walk in a new neighborhood: Strolling down a paved path that flanked a busy suburban byway, I crossed under the road through a pedestrian tunnel, automatically plugging my nose as I learned to do in New York, but unnecessarily, since the only whiff I got was of concrete.

The path wound along a creek, where gangs of loose-limbed kids sifted the water, looking for tadpoles. I could see the road I needed to be on, but took a chance that the path would bring me back where I’d begun.

I passed willows that gleamed with the first green of spring. And farther along there were more kids, careening down the path on too-big bikes or too-small scooters. A playground sign that said “For children ages 5-9” had been altered: “For children ages 5-59.” Young mothers threw back their heads and laughed. No one seemed to have a care.

I know that the homes along the path sheltered bankruptcies and infidelities, rebellious teenagers and addled grandparents. It was just that, in that early spring light, these didn’t seem to matter. It seemed like a new beginning, like an Eden.

Stegner and Place

Stegner and Place

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Today is the birthday of Wallace Stegner, writer, teacher and celebrator of place. The American West was his place and he described it well, its aridity and openness, the loneliness of its grain elevators and grasslands, the way it has shaped our character.

The New World transient is a person in motion, Stegner says. “Acquainted with many places, he is rooted in none.” Because he moved frequently himself, Stegner knows “the dissatisfaction and hunger that result from placelessness.” Which leads him to this conclusion:

“A place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it — have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods and communities, over more than one generation.”

I have thought about these words often since reading them this fall, have considered their truth as I try to feel at home in the suburbs. Thinking about them has led me to the library, to books about the people who lived here before us, to local historians who’ve discovered lost roads. I’m trying my best to feel at home here. But the “dissatisfaction and hunger” remain.

Old Part of Town

Old Part of Town

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Yesterday I drove to the old part of town, to a D.C. I seldom visit, where the houses are stately and imposing and the yards settled and calm. I was struck, as I often am, by how various neighborhoods and landscapes create different moods.

How wide open and exposed is the world of the outer suburbs, how on the edge of things. I think about the medieval town, walled and protected, houses clinging together for survival. And I see in our wide yards a sort of bravado.

Openness has its appeal, but so does the fenced yard, the closed gate, the hedged garden. There is something in here precious enough to protect — to make you long to be inside.

A College Place

A College Place

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Last night I went to a gathering of old college friends. We asked the inevitable questions (where do you live? what do you do? and — the clincher — when did you graduate?) and then we told stories. I heard about some great pranks and learned that two paintings in the reception area of my freshman dorm were recently found to be worth millions of dollars.

At some point our conversation turned to why we chose Hanover in the first place. And for most of us it was the physical beauty of the place. Hanover College sits on a bluff overlooking a double bend of the Ohio River. A winding forest road leads to the classical campus with old brick buildings in the Georgian style. To unwind, students stroll to the Point to look at the river.

I transferred from Hanover after my sophomore year, decided I wanted a campus near a big city. But when I think of college it’s Hanover I remember most. The low, mournful call of the barges passing, the broad Ohio curving; it’s a view that, every time I return, seems too perfect to be true.

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McKibben on Place

McKibben on Place

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I just finished Bill McKibben’s short book Wandering Home, his thoughts on environment and place as he walked through Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks.

Here’s one passage, about how it feels to arrive somewhere on foot: “It’s not like arriving in the car for a dinner party. On foot you arrive late or early, without excuse, and settle into whatever conversation is under way. It took you a while to get there, so you’re obviously going to stay awhile. It feels like visiting in an older sense of the word…”

And here’s McKibben on the loss of old codgers: “It’s as if someone came and knocked down a thousand-acre stand of mature timber, as far as I’m concerned.” When these people were alive, McKibben says, “there was a quality of memory that I believe informed the place. It was tangible. It was in the air, it made the place what it was for me.”

In the suburbs, old codgers, or even young ones, are in short supply. Perhaps that is one reason why there’s no “there” here.

Proportion and Scale

Proportion and Scale

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A trip through the suburbs this weekend helped me see our corner of the world with fresh eyes. Yes, we have congestion here, and within walking distance are large houses on small lots. But our neighborhood has a wooded, tucked-away feel, and my shoulders relaxed as we drove home under low clouds and a gathering wind.

What makes the difference in Folkstone is having a sense of the land we lie on. The houses work in tandem with topography rather than trying to overwhelm or undo it. We are an older subdivision, too, with houses in the 2,000 to 2,500 square-feet range rather than double that amount. How much easier it is to harmonize when you have room to do it in.

There is a sense of proportion and scale here that soothes the spirit. It’s good to be reminded of this.

Uptown View: An Elegy

Uptown View: An Elegy

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Yesterday I learned that a friend I’d corresponded with for years, the editor who hired me at McCall’s Magazine, passed away in May. I hadn’t seen her in years, but I was always fond of her. She was the second person gone on my Christmas card list this year (the other my old boyfriend Gerry, who I eulogized seven months ago in this blog) and I was so sad to learn of her death. Sad for her family above all, but sad also for the passing of an era that she represents.

Lisel was first an agent and then an editor. She was smart and funny and wore her hair in a simple page boy style. She was the one who called me after I dropped off my resume and clips a few days after finishing up a graduate program in journalism. “Well, you’re sort of old to be an intern,” she said, with an endearing New Yorkish bluntness I was just beginning to understand. “But we’d like to have you for the summer.”

The summer turned into five years, and I went from editorial assistant to articles editor. Lisel became executive editor. She was always the calm heart of the magazine, which (like all the “Seven Sister” publications at that time) was edited by a man. I can still recall her big-looped script and her slightly distracted air. She was an intellectual, as many women’s magazine editors were then, and though we had our share of “Lady Di” covers, inside McCall‘s you could still find splendid fiction, elegant essays and controversial reports.

The magazine offices were housed at 230 Park Avenue, the ornate building which straddles that great thoroughfare. The elevators had painted clouds on their ceiling; they made me feel like I was in heaven. And in so many ways, I was. I’ve thought a lot about that place and those people since hearing the news of Lisel, about the long hall where she and other top editors had their offices. They all had an uptown view of Park Avenue; the whole world was at their feet.

Last Class

Last Class

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We gathered for the last time last night. Eighteen people more different than alike, drawn together to explore the special places in our lives, whether real or metaphorical. Whatever lead me to the class — call it grace, serendipity or dumb luck — I am grateful for it. And I will miss these folks; we have come to know each other well these last few months.

I haven’t quite figured out how to tackle the big subject that intrigues and bedevils me. I’m still “in process.” But I’ve had a few epiphanies along the way and the class readings, discussions and blog posts have dug deep furrows, turned soil that will produce something in the future (at the very least the required paper due next week!).

As I made my way home last night, though, it wasn’t place that was on my mind; it was people.