Place -- Dianne Pearce

 

Honestly, if I could live anywhere in the world, it would be Ocean City, New Jersey, USA.

Yes, someone who would willing relocate to New Jersey.

A few years ago now, when my spouse and I decided we had to gtfo of exit Delaware, we were ten miles from the Atlantic Ocean and a lovely beach. But we weren't in Ocean City.

We realized, when we burned completely out on where we were, that the pandemic had freed us. My husband's company used to have a rule that only a certain percentage of the office could work remotely, but during the pandemic the company paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent a few floors in the Oppenheimer building that no one went to. And they noticed that while that rent ate away their budget, all the work got done, so they dumped their offices... forever. And I had begun teaching and tutoring remotely as well, and one thing the colleges realized was that, while in the main they wanted everyone back on campus (especially the dorm colleges), students didn't wanna by a significant percentage. And, frankly, it makes sense. Introverts have always existed; they have just been forced to live an extrovert life. Once we got our chance we were loath to put that fake-extrovert noose back on. Or, at least, I was.  And I made a circus peanuts salary anyway, as an adjunct. So I told the schools it would be remote or nothing from now on. And I am remote (though less-well paid, to be sure). I lucked out.

And that all meant we could live (bound by my spouse's job's one rule: continental USA) anywhere we wanted. My spouse had no real preferance or allegiance to a particluar place. We'd met in Philly, and Philly can be a fun cool place to live, but it can also be pretty racially divided, and you can bump up against some unwelcoming situations if you move into an entrenched neighborhood (meaning the same families have lived there for generations), essentally the same as we encountered in rural Delaware. Spouse grew up in a blue collar suburb of Pittsburg, but it is too landlocked, insular, and cold in winter for me. We love Washington D.C., but realized that living there would probably mean not living there because it is so expenssive to live in the district, but living adjacent in part of one of the two surrounding states, both of which voted for Republican governors? Ahem. Nope. And so, weighing the points of which political and weather climate I could tolerate, and where the best opportunites were for our daughter, we settled back in California, and since there we have moved twice, in order to achieve the Californa dream of a short commute to work or school, and now that we have that, we are pretty well content.

But Ocean City, in New Jersey....

I bring this up because I consider place a living breathing character in fiction, poetry, and in my daily life too. I don't know that anyone from my childhood family viewed it that way. One of my parents liked to travel a little, and the other not at all, and I think that what mattered most to them was that we get dug-in, and never move. But, to be real, we're not all born in the place where we fit. Now, we cannot all get to where we fit, and not getting to where we fit may have a profound and negative affect on our lives even as we don't realize that it's a pinch point. And, sometimes, we love places for illogical reasons. 

I love Ocean City, New Jersey (OCNJ from here on).

It gets overrun by tourists in the summer, and, when I was a child, I was one of them for one to two weeks every summer. And yes, that's partially why it is magical to me, because I spent family vacations there.

But get this, my family was not picture-perfect. So those vacation involved a lot that was heavily fraught. 

Later, when I was in my twenties and thirties and dating, I got to visit OCNJ more in the off-season, and that's what I fell in love with. I love it when it looks like this:

And when it looks like this:

I love it when it looks like this:

Maybe I love the introvert's OCNJ. Could be.

I love to ride my bike on the five-mile boardwalk. I love to get cookies from Wards' Pastry. I love to get pizza from Mack Manco's, which has changed its name to Manco and Manco (MM), but it has never changed for me. ;) I love the way the wind sounds and feels on my body there. I love the way the salt water perfumes the air, all day, every day, and no other beach has ever smelled like that. and I love that it is an island, cut off from the country, and available only by bridge. It's a very romantic place to breathe deep and think equally deep thoughts.

I don't want to live there liked I lived there as a child, with my childhood family and so little autonomy. I want to live there, in my romantic notions, as a widow, probably at least somewhat bereft (dear Spouse, how I miss you... from time-to-time), going inward, thinking, writing, biking, eating my daily cut of pizza (MM calls them cuts, not slices) while the wind rattles my teeth, at the edge of the sea, on an island. Fighting the wind as I head back to my place, with its scraggly yard and a pottery studio in the garage where I throw lopsided masterpieces until dusk, and then I venture into the kitchen for dinner. On my own my night meal is asparagus, cabbage, mushrooms, radishes, strong cheese, olives, sardines, all the stinky food washed down with cold, leftover coffee. One night a week I see whatever is at the theater, on my own. One night a week I play chess with the town chess club (there must be one!), where I talk a little with my other reticent islanders. In my beach-town cedar-shingle home I listen to NPR, play my favorite vinyl on repeat, sing, dance, dress haphazardly. 

Sure, I want to live in Paris... for a year or so, but not forever as my final place. I'd like to try out London, and be wealthy enough to live at some place for a bit like the Arconia (fictional hotel of the series ONLY MURDER IN THE BUILDING) in New York City. And I still like touristing in Philadelphia, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Santa Fe. I'm up for travel any time my wallet is and the pets are safe at home. 

Maybe my spouse and I could spend a year in Nanchang with our daughter, discovering her home country. It could be great; it was a great place to visit. 

I haven't written, in my memory anyway, fiction about Ocean City since I was in college, but whenever I write a story the first thing I do is conjur up the character's surroundings, and stick myself in them like a bathtub. It's all part of who the characters are, and how they feel, and how they react. It's what makes THE STRANGER (Camus) so powerful to me: the fact that Meursault is so affected by the place, the weather, his feelings of being an outsider.

Last year we lived in a place that was a fine place. We were safe, had (just) enough space, had routines, felt comfortable, and we "owned it," by which I mean we paid the mortgage. And the entire year or so I felt pinch. It was the wrong space for me. It was hard for me to focus, truly, and I had a difficult time working on my needs, dreams, responsibilites because I felt dislocated.

Now we're back in a rental for the first time in sixteen years. Landlord is chill: let us build a shed in the yard; location is awesome: one block away from a street full of restaurants and shops, and maybe two miles away from my daughter's school. House is a teeny craftsman, which suits me enourmously well, and is 100% out of my price range as a buy, and nicely in my price point as a renter. Go figure.

So, yeah, renting has its many ways of pinching, but the extent to which this place does not pinch me over our previous mortgaged place is outstanding.

I wish, in my limited skills as a creative person, I could find a way to describe that salty smell of OCNJ, and the way the hand that's always holding my heart looses its grip the moment I cross the bridge over the Atlantic bay. I have always had the sensation of never taking a breath until I got there and took that first salty breath.

To infuse writing with place we have to rely on readers being able to translate, to having felt something similar at some time in their lives, otherwise all the flavor we inject won't mean anything. I don't know that a landlocked person can truly understand how it feels to look out on the vastness of an ocean. I remember, in THE PEARL Stenbeck writes that, "But the music of the pearl was shrilling with triumph in Kino. [ ] And electric strength had come to him now the horizons were kicked out." Places can do that to us; they can keep us hemmed in, pinched, or, perhaps, cuddled, depending on how you look at that, or they can open us to the vastness of this small planet we share. If you are someone who has travelled, stop and think about how many people have not. The greater percentage is with the second group. So how do we write about our places in a way that the things they do to us can be understood by a reader who has never felt the embrace of anywhere but the where they were born into? That's the trick. 

Happy Holidays to everyone. May the end of 2023 find you secure, loved, full of pleasing, filling food, and in a decent (enough) place. If you have all that hooked up, then you can probably find your creative self. Much good luck to you~