In This Life Like Weeds

Fogelsville, PA: friend of mine took this. not quite sure how it might apply to this post, but it sure is pretty.There are a handful of statements (theories?) offered in Tuan’s “Time and Place” chapter that sparked some immediate reflections on a few memories and past observations. Early in the chapter, he presents a metaphor in which he is wishes to become “vice-president in a motorcar company,” but to get there he will have to settle at “foreman” and “manager” first (180). He describes a sense of uncertainty at being held up on the way to his goal, and that is something I can directly connect with. When working toward an objective, I’m usually not comfortable resting along the way, especially if that rest is unplanned. That particular metaphor resonates with me as well: I hate the idea that, someday, I may have to resolve myself to working at some “way station” job before I hit the big time! I realize that makes me sound like some asshole American entitled white male, but in my head, it’s pretty reasonable. A little later on, Tuan writes specifically of family vacations, and how, while on vacation, “the sense of place extends beyond individual localities to a region defined by these localities” (183). This brought to mind family vacations to Long Beach Island, New Jersey, a mere three hour car-ride from our home in PA. We went there regularly for over ten years (including the year we moved and had no money and stayed in a structure comparable to a vaguely luxurious trailer home). We don’t regularly go there as a family anymore, and I haven’t visited in over two years, but I would still know my way around the town that we stayed with no problem. The good arcade with the ferris wheel and cooler games is about five blocks down the street from the really shitty arcade with better, less pirate-themed mini-golf courses, which is next to Uncle Will’s Pancake House, where you can sit next to one of two statuettes of well-dressed pigs (which can get kind of fucked up if you’re eating bacon, but I suppose maybe you deserve it if you’re eating bacon in the first place, and yes, the view is spectacular from atop my pedestal), which about a five-minute walk from the house we stayed at the last five or six times we went, where my parents still go, which is across the street from the park where hundreds of old people unsafely drive their vans on to the sandy grass to watch other old people play big band music every Wednesday. It’s really an excellent place, but it took a few years in a row of not going to make me realize how much I enjoy it there. Finally, after Tuan starts talking about “attachment of a place as a function of home,” he mentions simply seeing a place for just a moment, like “the first glimpse of the desert through a mountain pass” (184), can bring forth some intense instinctual sense of recognition. I feel this way when I see wide-open plains or fields. I took a train to Montreal last summer, and most of upstate New York along the route was just fields and big lakes, yet somehow I didn’t fall asleep for any of the twelve-hour train ride. That appearance of endlessness, of infinity, always captures my attention. I don’t know what that really means. I guess what I’m getting at here is that a lot of what Tuan has written in ‘Space and Place’ leaves me thinking of the past. I’m not so sure that there’s anything new in there to find, but it’s refreshing to go back to from some new angles.