Oftentimes people attach significance and meaning to objects or places that would otherwise be immaterial. This sentimentality, in my opinion, is a way to house our emotions somewhere where we don’t have to cling to them ourselves; we only have to reimagine the excitement or anguish that occurred in the past when we are actually there. We can rest our memories there– let the ghosts from our past live in the buildings and on the streets that once housed the events– where they can’t haunt us any longer. Yet a place that might hold significance for me is just another nondescript house or room, full of open possibilities (for new memories, perhaps) to another. The passerbys aren’t haunted by the past we associate with each place and have yet to attach any significance to it for themselves. In writer Ian Frazier’s essay entitled “Dearly Disconnected,” he poignantly describes his own connections with places, places that he is afraid might soon evaporate, taking his memories and attachments with them. He associates stories and details of his life with inanimate objects, specifically pay phones and the booths they belong to. He writes about one pay phone that was the only thing connecting he and his wife before they were married and another where he received the grave news that his friend had been diagnosed with cancer. To him, these telephone booths served as a way of connecting people, not only through the obvious– the fact that people are connected literally with phone calls– but also the way that “they suggest the human average; they belong to anybody who had a couple of coins.” Everyone who used them was connected because booths were where different memories were formed from different people that were all associated with the same place. He sees pay phones almost as overused memory storers that will soon be wiped out. He mentions how cell phones are rendering pay phones obsolete, how this connection people have with a central memory storing place will be broken once the booths are removed entirely.
I had an encounter with a significant place from my past only two days ago. It was the neighborhood I grew up in which, surprisingly, I only live one block away from now. In the past, I had been afraid to go by it unless I was passing through to get to Michael’s or Trader Joe’s, and even then, I would avoid being too observant of the street or remembering the painful memories I associate with it. Until… Several days ago, I was on my way home from Trader Joe’s, disappointed because they were all out of peppermint pretzel slims– the one item I had gone there for. It was then that I decided to take a detour, a trip down my own personal memory lane– or street, rather. The trip was almost inevitable, as I live on 19th street and this was 18th street. I first drove down 18th, the street where I had, only about 8 years ago, been hit by a car. It was uncharacteristically calm; I was the only car humming down the road. I felt a twinge of irrational fear, almost as if it were to happen again, though I was driving a car myself (ironically, I could only afford this car because when I turned 18, the insurance gave me a sum from the accident). I then ventured on, turning on Crestmont place where everything else had happened to me during my childhood. I halted, in my car, by the house I grew up in, the place of physical abuse, mental captivity and molestation. Suddenly, I remembered how everything had looked when I was young. The memories flashed across my mind like an episode of Cold Case where an adult suspect instantly transforms into their much younger version. The house was no longer illuminated by the sunlight, it was grey and dead as it had looked to me when I would come home from school in the 6th grade. Protected by the shelter of my car, I reexamined the details of this newly renovated house. There, upon the door which I was once locked in by, the gateway into my childhood confinement, was a perfectly pleasant holiday wreath. Here, where my obsessive-compulsive father had once let the grass fade and the plants wither– he refused to let us go outside and eat from or touch plants for fear of pesticides– the grass was now healthy and rich in color. There was an unassuming family sedan sitting in the driveway where the social services van had taken my siblings and me away from my mother years ago. Across the street in the house where I had been placed into foster care with foster parents, who at the time I despised, was now a sober living home, a place for people to break free from their ailments and addictions. Yet even with these rosy coverings, I still felt the captivity and anger I had once felt as a child. The people who currently live on this street are blissfully unaware of the secrets the houses are keeping, and I almost felt betrayed by the houses– how could they bring so much happiness to these new families when they had once sheltered the agony I am now left to deal with? Why are they flourishing, welcoming, and beautiful now, and why couldn’t they have been this way for me? But alas, these “bygone passions” were not “covered with plaques and markers listing the notable events that occurred at each particular spot.” How could these people be aware of what happened on this street or in these houses? I “still resent (the street) for the unhappiness (it) cause me (and) I will never forgive (it), though not for any fault of (its) own,” as Frazier so eloquently puts it. And real estate agents are only required to inform the families entering a new home if a death took place there, not the loss of innocence or the confinement of nine children and their terrified mother.
I now realize that I used this area as a coping mechanism. At first, I avoided the street because it was holding all those agonizing emotions from my past that I was yet unwilling to face. The street was a storage shed for my past and the things I was unable to face at certain times in my life. I had attached an emotion and a feeling to each place when, in reality, these were just willing spaces, empty if not for the humans and their personal objects that fill them. It was not as if places, like the house I grew up in, had intended to be the site of abuse for me and now happiness for the current residents, they were just the walls and roofs surrounding the people and events that took place there. In truth, the ghosts and skeletons in the closets of the places we used to or currently interact with, exist nowhere except in our heads. We are the only ones who attach significance to a place, it is not the place itself that is significant. When Frazier took his children to see the phone booth that had once been the only means of communicating with his wife, “it didn’t impress them much. It’s just a nondescript Bell Atlantic pay phone on the cement wall of a building” and though it holds memories for him, it is still just a “notable, if private, historic site’” that doesn’t mean much to others. I certainly can’t continue to blame 18th street for the things that occurred within its boundaries nor can I keep using it as a way to hold all of my past pain. As Frazier puts it, “our passions proliferate into illegibility, and the places they occur can’t hold them… romantics like me will have to reimagine our passions as they are– unmoored to earth.” We need to take hold of our memories and past troubles, instead of trapping them in the brittle and destructible confines of a place or object that we can so easily avoid. We need to see these sites for what they are– mere man-made structures, not places to hide away our sorrows or joy– because someday they will be gone, like the pay phone.
