I don’t know why the places that I have lived have almost always felt sacred to me but they have. After Presbyterian Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, I was taken home to a place on Thomas Street in Newark. The street is no longer there, but have these pictures of it in my mind and these movie like replays of what happened there. Joey and Carol and I were children there and it was there that they told me about my first ghost. I was excited and afraid. The place held the ghost. I think that was when I first considered an entity that inhabited a place, at least for a time, at least in some minds.
The address was 780 Broadway, Newark, New Jersey. This was before the era of zip codes. It was a basement apartment that was considered two and one half rooms because of the kitchenette. I loved it there. There were glass enclosed cabinets standing up on a hardwood floor. I lay curled on that floor and played with baseball cards, marbles, and toy soldiers. I could look out and see the sunlight and the passing traffic. It never occurred to me that I lived beneath the ground. That little apartment held the enclosure of my existence.
I experienced holidays there for the very first time. I remember my very first joys being there. My life flowed with family then. The concept of friendship was fairly new. Joey and I were friends because his mom and my mom were friends. I had not realized that friends were people that you met.
That small basement apartment came with horrors. I contracted asthma there. I had to put my mom back together there and save her from going insane. But the place was good to me. I’ve gone back to visit more than a few times. Inner city economics has not been kind to it and I think that it may well disappear.
I can picture every inch of that small apartment and they soothe me. I learned to read there. I recited scripture to my great grandmother there, in our shared bedroom, where she lay dying for years. I believe the room offered all the comfort that it could.
We moved to a now nonexistent apartment house on 41 Lincoln Avenue in Newark. It was above ground and bright, on the third floor. I mostly remember it sexually, after all I was just 13. But I read the first book that made me cry in that apartment, Animal Farm. I lived there when Pope John the 23rd was elected as pontiff. I was re-baptized as a Catholic there.
I remember French glass doors and a long hallway. I can feel the walls. I can see out of the windows. I can hear the song “I Will Follow Him.” Apartments are like harlots, aren’t they? They are rented out, passed around. They sometimes become hardened. They bear witness at the mercy of business.
There have been so many apartments. Some had no heat. Some had no way to be cool. Some were without toilet. You might think that I lived in an underdeveloped country, but it was all in New Jersey.
John Lennon wrote, “There are places I remember…” Places are not always a silent witness. Sometimes they speak to you. It depends on whether you are able to listen.
The first house where I lived came about because of debt. My stepfather gambled and then gambled again. My mom tired of paying off the endless debts and made the calculated decision that since my stepfather was actually a hard worker that if she put him in more debt that he had ever known that he would curtail the gambling.
It was a two family house on a one block one way street that also housed the police department and the firehouse for an upscale, suburban community called Glen Ridge. We rented out the second floor. I was given the bedroom of a four room apartment. They placed a hide abed into what was supposed to be the dining room we had an eat-in kitchen and what was glorious to me was a backyard that did not feature broken glass. I was a city kid with high rolls and leather, and this was the madras capital of the world. But there was a porch and a basement that we did not have to share. We could have a washing machine that we did not have to rent by the load. There was a garage and a driveway that we only shared with the next door neighbors.
Delight of delights was when my Aunt Dotty and Uncle John became the tenants of the upstairs apartment. It was the place where both of them would spend their last days. We were able to get a dog. My room was mine except for the closet, which they needed. When I looked out my windows, I did not see feet or traffic, I saw green.
I lived on every level of that house, including the fairly uninhabitable attic. I knew every room and every window and every doorway. The first time that I had sex in a place where I lived was this house. The only other experiences had been in motels and car seats. I first took out my bedframe and put a mattress and box spring on the floor and called it my bed there.
On the whole, memories of places are fonder for me than memories of people. Experience attaches to a place differently than it attaches to people. Things become colored by future interactions with people but they tend to stay the same with memories of places. The image of a staircase with a stained glass window brings me a feeling of warmth. An above ground pool in the back yard brings me joy. When I lived in the attic, I would descend the pull down ladder at night and cool off in the pool. I was then able to sleep in the stifling heat of the attic.
Quirky things are now comical. The pantry was unheated and things would freeze out there. The basement would take on water. The house abutted the high school field and the band would blare music into my room. They were all annoying at the time but now they just bring a smile of remembrance.
Rahway, what more can I possibly say about that place? I loved it so but it was never mine.The feelings that I found there have been seminal in what much of my writing tries to express. I found the seeds of hope for a new way of looking at life in Rahway. Now it is gone. I’ve visited and revisited that place so very many times. I know every crevice and every corner, but is there a use for those memories? Are they baggage or propellers?
I once lived in a garage. It was in Paterson, New Jersey. My oldest friend had lived there since I met him and now he was getting married and moving to a larger space. That converted garage had been magic for me. It was there that I first heard the music of Phil Ochs and Pete Seeger. It was there that I first listened to Hal Holbrook perform Mark Twain tonight. It was there that I first heard Lightnin Hopkins and Lenny Bruce. I am so grateful to Lanny. He taught me so much and then gave me this garage.
I almost died there. I had no money, no food, no income, and no car. The sink was irreparably clogged. I shivered listening to the street traffic at night. My door was right there and there were only factories around. It was very dark at night and the door was flimsy. I wondered how he could have lived there for so long.
That garage and Rahway were places of learning for me. In the garage were stacks of magazines and a fish tank on the kitchen table. Empty bottles of wine and tequila- It was a place that I loved to be, until I had to leave. Rahway was much different and somehow the same. Love of a place is only a rental agreement. You may love it forever but it moves on.
I think that it may be the same with all places. You embrace but then move along. The embrace of a home is something different. More strange than inter-species, it is an embrace between creatures of fast time and creatures of space.
There was this kid that came to the garage, at first he was looking for Lanny. But he found me and brought pot. At the time I was listening to Jackson Browne’s Late for the Sky. The kid was enraptured by it. He thought it was the best thing that he’d ever heard. I smiled and felt old. I wondered how many people had sat in this garage and heard the best music that they had ever heard before. I think that it must have been dozens.
I remember being hungry and sick and without money. My car was broken and I was walking up a steep hill for two miles a day to get to school. I knew that I couldn’t maintain, but I didn’t see alternatives. I had to finally have a degree. I’d needed to do it on my own but my sense of stubborn pride was failing.
One night my friend Howard came over and said, “I’m taking you home to stay with my family for a while.” I felt touched by the magic of the world. One of those times when the world is not just about physics-
Howard and Karen’s home had been Howard’s parents’ home. There was his beautiful wife, and three wondrous children. I had a room in the attic. There was a high up, stained- glass window. I had my own radio, a mattress and box spring, and my first ever down quilt. I graduated from college in this room and did my first preparations for teaching as a graduate assistant here. I can feel the temperature of it in my mind like an emotional thermometer.
It was an old house and Howard employed me to earn my keep. I ripped the front of the house away with a crowbar. I dug a trench from the street to the house. It was four feet deep and I dug it by hand. He was most at home in the garage. He taught me how he cared for his motorcycles there. He tried to teach me mechanics but I was hopeless. Instead I offered Shakespeare.
I gave back the only thing that I had to give then, an opportunity to learn from someone who had taught me. It wasn’t a gift that had financial obligations, but it was a gift given in gratitude for being able to share a space in time.
The gift of a place is not easily given, it can’t be. A person has to see the place and embrace it and be embraced by it. Others must join in. It is very difficult to give the gift of the experience of a place. It may be sought after but not possible.
Places that you remember cascade with aging. I can see each and every classroom where I ever taught. Every window out of which I looked while reciting Anabel Lee. Time in still life, like a gif with some animation.
I left Howard and Karen’s home for relocation. I was moving to Minneapolis, I was all in on love that I did not realize was gone. It was a three room apartment on University Avenue. There was a kitchen, a middle room and a bedroom. The bathroom was shared with others.
I remember the thunderstorms and rain that washed down the street in torrents. I remember walking everywhere. I remember the Mississippi, way up north. I recall the yoga in that apartment. I can feel the air there. Images flood from a place that was never ever mine, but I can see out the windows. I think that I was only there for 6 weeks, but so many years later, so vivid. That is the character of a place that you remember, whatever the reasons for and duration of stay.
I came back to Rahway and found that my home was no longer a home and now a battleground, because of the people. Everyone feels like they own a place, but places are not owned. One can be a caretaker.
I’m not bad at husbandry, although that is a matter of judgement. The first place that the law said belonged to me and the bank was a townhouse. It was an end unit. There was magnificent light in some rooms and almost none in others. It suffered from a lack of insulation that caused a couple of rooms to be less than comfortable for a good part of the year. But there was the first fireplace that I ever had that was mine, at least it felt that way then.
There was this floating staircase and a bedroom that had a sort of balcony. There was a Jacuzzi. Many moments of a place are attached to people but some are just between you and the place. It wasn’t like that for me there. Everything got attached to people. The coloration wasn’t great. I was glad to sell it.
My fondness for places seems to be related to how much I was able to write there. Maybe, in the process, my writing is an attachment to place as well as time. A place that my mind sees as a mental laboratory- A place where I can be alone with the natural world-
Where we moved, on Decker Pond Road was just such a place. There were windows looking out over a fine, small lake. This place was the essence of magic for me. The embrace of person and place, is what I felt in Rahway, but that was never mine. I felt it again on Decker Pond Road in Lake Tranquility. We lived there for eighteen years, long enough to plant trees and watch them grow. As long as the life span of creatures who would share this place with you and then move along to somewhere else.
Only some of these creatures were human. People came and stayed and then left. Some creatures spent their entire lives there. Keats and Fitzgerald lived and died there. Howard and Tom called it their home for a time and then moved on. There is not a day that goes by that I do not think of that lake and of my gardens there. There is not a day that goes by that I do not look out of those windows. The flowers the trees and the ground are woven into my soul.
It was our glorious home. I tell myself that we left it better than we found it, but I am not sure what that means to a place. I know that it wore me out and would have crushed me with its challenges, at least it seems that way. All logical evidence leads to that conclusion. I wanted my home with its magnificent views and gardens to be a place I never left. I didn’t get my way.
The soul is in part a product of the places that you have lived. I think that place speaks to soul. I’m not sure about the why of that mystery. But I know that it exists for me, mystery or fallacy, it exists for me. The bond between person and place seems to extend beyond death of people, but I am less sure about the death of place.
Rahway burnt down and was condemned. By chance, I visited before it was destroyed. I felt the passion and the depth that a memory of place has. It felt desolate. People and places have this in common, sometimes they feel desolate. Travelling back up the highways to my gardens and views and animals and trees, I felt renewed and if I could pray, one of my prayers would be to have places avoid desolation. I want my places to prosper and my fervent hope is that they will have benefited from my tending.
The history of people and places is intertwined. Each have their highs and lows. If you recall a particular place, does it not usually come with a warmth bath of feelings? I does for me.
There are so many more places and not enough time, for me, but I pray that there is time for them.