The Geography of Grace | Notre Dame Magazine - Autumn 2000

The Geography of Grace - Kerry Temple

While I haven't been writing this past week, I have certainly been reading, nearly completing three books and midway through a fourth.  Travel has taken me out of my routine and I have yet to adapt my writing to being relocated.  I'm too distracted by the newness of my destination, I can't settle down into a rhythm, finding that precious reverie that one falls into when the words tumble out.  (Not that they always tumble cleanly...if I've noticed one thing about my writing in this blog, it's that I don't edit myself all that much.  Whole words missing!  Awkward sentences!  Misspellings!  Overuse of exclamation points...and ellipses! and parentheses for that matter, not to mention hackneyed phrases...but who cares?!?)

Kerry Temple wrote this essay about a decade ago; a rumination on place, specifically the campus of Notre Dame in Indiana and her home in Louisiana.  She needed to get away from her childhood home and found herself in the cold north.  Yet as she ages, she reflects on how important it is to her that she have a place with roots.  Dutifully, she thanks her parents for remaining there.

She talks of change in place, which, if we ever leave the place we grew up, is nearly inevitable, and shocking to our memories when we return.  I lived on a street that looked like a cross section of a staircase if viewed from a plane.  The two ninety degree turns kept our little lane from being a site of high speed driving, working more effectively than speed bumps.  Today, the street has been straightened.  A warehouse occupies the field that I found impossibly huge.  The houses are still there, but they look old, tiny, worn out and they've effectively been placed on an alley that was my old street.  How are kids supposed to play there now?

I had some difficulties with Ms. Temple's essay and I think I know why.  She writes too prettily, seriously, too self-aware.  There are bits of alliteration that are amusing and distracting.  But mostly, what makes this suffer, for me, not for you necessarily, is that I was reading The Liar's Club by Mary Karr at the time.  Most of that memoir takes place deep down in southeast Texas.  Ms. Temple's roots are in southwest Louisiana.  Where Ms. Temple writes in respectful prose and laments the losses of bayous and flowers while never once mentioning the oppressive humidity or sharing a memory of mosquito borne pestilence.  Her views are so starkly romantic after reading Ms. Karr's book that I had trouble reconciling the two visions.

Yet our memories of home, if we're lucky enough to have lived in a place long enough to have them, are likely to be romanticized if the place and its people didn't take a figurative dump on us.  I would guess that Ms. Temple's parents, almost certainly Catholic, were a little more responsible and little less crazy than Mary Karr's.

There are times when I miss my home, but it really isn't the place that I miss.  Physical place is mutable, untrustworthy, even the mountains and shores are so.  What I miss are the people.  I miss hearing my grandparents and my parents talking together at the kitchen table in the morning, voices low and rumbling, sipping coffee, while I lay snug in bed, warm in the blankets and the sounds, not knowing what their words meant.  I miss my friends knocking on the door to see if I got some time to play ball or Hot Wheels or pick blackberries or set up our plastic army guys and recreate a movie we just saw or a book we read.  I miss my sisters, bugging the older one when she had her friends over, keeping the younger one away from my baseball cards or my chess set.

I miss myself, when I was innocent.  When my biggest sin was not cleaning my room or not wanting to eat lima beans.  Life was indeed easier, simpler.  Sure, my parents had ridiculous arguments and there was plenty of tension.  They had terrific money troubles.  I got into the occasional fight, though I never started one.  My older sister dealt with (and continues to deal with) serious congenital health issues.  But through all of this, I know that I was loved and protected.  Nothing too crazy ever happened to me.  I enjoyed living.

Place might evoke those positive feelings in me, but I would never rely on them to do so.  Not where I came from anyway.  Despite the roots to that place, I am disconnected from it.  We can go back physically, but I am far too different to ever go back for real.