Spirit of Place

It’s a three day trip. A whirlwind trip to Georgia, my first trip to the deep south to visit the old friends. The great old friends who’ve known you since you started to ‘get it,’ the great old friends who used to help you ‘get some.’ The friends who demand your honesty but leave room for your perspective. Those friends.

My only request was a visit to birth home and resting place of the great Martin Luther King JR. My fetish with American history required the trip. The national shrine to the national hero filled me up with hope and set the mood for the weekend. A weekend of thinking, laughing and love. A weekend in a special place.

As we left Atlanta and headed towards Athens I looked for the familiar in an unfamiliar setting. The Dairy Queens, the churches and the concrete. The word FRIENDLY came to embody the first palpable difference. A community of people who look you in the eye when you pass and tell you ‘Good Morning.’ How couldn’t it be a good morning? The drive is peaceful and green. The trees had decided it was time to bloom and did so en masse. You feel a cocoon of leaves close upon you like a security blanket; the near- tropical forest has been cut away just enough to make way for the concrete, but given the chance the trees would gladly retake the road. Given space and time.

As we turned into my friends’ house the spirit of this place percolated up through the soil, as if I could suddenly smell it. I could just make it out amidst the Dairy Queens, the churches the concrete—our uniformity, our collective unconscious, our common dream. So what makes a place unique? I don’t have an answer, it’s perplexing, but I think it has to do with that spirit percolating up. It has to do with that dream being dreamt by the people on that soil. And sometimes a place like Athens sprouts up and sometimes you’re lucky enough to know someone who lives there.

As I met the friends and lovers of my great old ‘buds’ I saw this spirit manifest. I found the familiar in their faces but found that nearly all of them needed only a single syllable for their names: Vic & Cal & K & Taye & Joe & Don & on & on. I wonder how long it takes before my friends’ names lose their second syllables. Not long I assume. And I think of the poster of Soujourner Truth in the MLK bookstore. She changed her name when God first spoke to her. It wont be long M & D. Well, Meg, I guess your name is already one syllable –but you get what I mean.

On my last night we went to the Manhattan Bar. Coming from NYC I found this funny, but there was nothing Manhattan about the bar; though everyone in this bar could, under different circumstances, be found in Manhattan. At the bar I noted to myself how many people had gone out of their way to tell me how much they dislike New York City. Almost as if talking about an ex boyfriend, though few had even been to the city. I think it came mostly from a pride in the land, a pride in all things rural, a pride in agrarian society. A pride I respect.

A kid from DC found his way to our table and talked to us for a while. This was a kid who was so like all of us—could have been to school with us – could have grown up with us—a kid who was both different and familiar. As the drinks went down and the time went on he made some harmless homophobic remarks. Nothing he said offended me, but he was far enough over the line that I felt the urge to declare my sexuality. I felt a rise of anger at the situation and the kid. I didn’t care about what he had said I was just tired of the continual defense of self. I looked up and on the wall, as if on cue, was our great hero Martin Luther King, JR. I thought of something I’d just read—what was it MLK? What did you say to the young black woman who once asked you “How can you tell me to love people who treat me as if I were not human?” –and how did you respond? Didn’t you say something beautiful? Didn’t you say, “We are all created in God’s image. So you love the image of God in that person” Yes you did. The alcohol clears a little in my head. And that’s why I visit your tomb and pay my respects to your life and your words. They speak to me too. A tiny queen from Brooklyn, by way of Wyoming, finds solace in the words of a dead black man. Your spirit is part of this place.
At brunch the next morning there is talk of secession as a confederate flag flutters in the wind behind the restaurant. Shouldn’t a state be allowed to do what it wants? Isn’t that real liberty? Solid questions. But I guess the more I think about it the more I realize that, well, this place tried that once and we still haven’t healed. We are stuck with each other. The North and the South, the Black and the White.
Later, after brunch, I squeezed in-between a 50 year-old white lady and a 20 something college kid, both who seem so familiar and so different, I felt the cocoon of leaves begin to recede. The old black driver jumped in the van and popped in a CD,“This is the Old Temptations!” He started the van and we pulled out onto the highway. The concrete. As the CD started spinning the old man began to sing, after a few verses I heard the old woman next to me chime in. And I thought to myself, maybe we’re more healed than we realize. “I say to myself, ‘You’re such a lucky guy’…But it was just my imagination running away with me. It was just my imagination
running away with me…”