The Placeholders

Some places are the past.

It’s not their fault.

It’s yours. Mine. Whatever tense the individual is here.

The places in question were just sitting there, minding their own business, their trees and their grass and their birds and their temperature and their wind, with their own history and their own stories and their own people; but sometimes these places become, for you, your place, and your place only because some concatenation of circumstances triggered a memory for you in a powerful visceral way than normal. And it’s okay to have a place that’s only yours; for all you know, you’re the only person there is. I mean, I know you’re not, but you don’t know that I even exist, so we’ll just have to agree to think we’re both people for now. Or not.

But I’m distracting myself, as I often distract myself. Self-distraction is a hell of a skill to have. I probably developed it on the rowing machine, forcing the minute and kilometers to one side so I could think about whatever I wanted while my body worked. Later, self-distraction became a bit more harmful, taking me away from the real world too easily...but you see, I’m doing it again.

Places.

On a geological scale, each place is a big rock, some dead stuff, a veneer of living stuff, and then an admixture of living and dead on top. Once something is dead, it goes through the live layer into the dead layer, and this happens to all the things. Each place is built on its own past, its plants and animals and objects that made it what it was, when it was that. Whatever it is now is probably different from what it was, in some way or another, but it couldn’t exist as it is now if it hadn’t been what it was then. One day this layer too will be that: just another layer of dead, supporting the next alive. This idea delights me. We’re all part of a broader goal: adding to the flavor of the Earth-sandwich.

So places are their past, if viewed objectively. Subjectively, however (and it’s important to try to view things subjectively, because that’s how you and I’ll be viewing them anyway, so I and you might as well admit it), a place is only as powerful as the memories, associations, sensations, and emotions it evokes in you. You and I are also creatures of our pasts, just like the places we go, and everything that our present selves do is, in some way, a reaction to our pasts.

And so it is with how we perceive what we see. Everything is viewed through our many filtred lenses, and what passes through is all that is significant to us. Sometimes very little will pass through. For example, I feel nothing in a desert, because a) I have no past with deserts, b) almost none of the stories that matter the most to me happen in deserts (as I write this, I realize that this is probably a problem, and I should read more Middle Eastern and Central African literature), c) there is no great beauty in deserts that I can see.

If, however, you put me in a public rec park in temperate weather, flowering trees around me and green, green grass lush on the fields, children playing on playgrounds, parents drinking together, benches that are always more comfortable than benches have a right to be, you will have gone a good way towards transporting me to one of the happiest times of my life (viz. the summers of 2009-2012, in the heyday of my prepubescent summer baseball career and all the memories that come from there). In my recollection of these good times, I’ve stripped my location of its context: removed the Wales, removed the construction sites, removed the luxury hotel on the edge with the red Mercedes that makes me want to turn Communist, removed the fact that the grass is mown for cricket, not for baseball; all of this just to serve my own moment of nostalgia. Looking at it that way, associative nostalgia looks more like a form of objectification than anything else.

And yet I think I’m wrong. I like recreational fields because I had a great time in recreational fields, and now I appreciate them like some people manage to appreciate wine. Each one is different, but each comes from the same idea. (This is how people can appreciate the differences between different wines, and anything that comes in varieties. They have a backbone of what-this-is to work with, so it’s easier to see what makes it unique.) The park I’m in is not the park I sweated on and thought on and cried on and laughed on as I learned how baseball can be a game and an art and a science and a sport and a philosophy and an absolute mindscrew and an inch towards third base. Then another. Then another. This field has its own stories, its own characteristics, and because I recognize the similarities, the differences are thrown into sharper relief. The Mondrian color scheme of the playground. The finely-grained asphalt on the tennis courts that I’ve never seen before. The way each field has a direction, is more than a stretch of grass. To me it will never be “just a park.” No, this is “Town Park, (Conwy, Wales Vintage).”

I’ve been walking through this park for days, collecting flavors, distilling essences, pinching up blades of grass. Soon I’ll bottle it up and put it on my shelf, next to “City Park, (Glasgow, Scotland Vintage)”, on the “2019” shelf.

It’s a nice cellar I keep. None of the bottles are for sale, but you’re welcome to taste of one for free, if you’d like. I’d like to know where it takes you.