Places are no more than memories of visions, smells, and experiences to be relived and reconstructed by individual minds. Therefore New York, London, or the Grand Canyon will mean vastly different things to each who contemplates them.

Given these individual experiences, can we ever be connected by place?

I'm partial to E. B. White's intimate portrait of his adopted city:

On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city’s walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town.
From Essays of E. B. White

Grace Paley   Paley's name has a visual symmetry to it, don't you think? Her birth name is Grace Goodman which, alternatively, has lovely alliteration. I think I prefer the former, opting for the visual over the audible. (December 11, 1922 - August 22, 2007) spent her life in the Bronx and much later Vermont, and her memory of those places are the heart and soul of Begin Again, Collected Poems.

34th Street Song

With joy she showed the traveler Macy's
That's Macy's there right by Korvette's
and Gimbel's
Oh you were right not to get out at 14th Street
Macy's is nice but Klein's was the store
and it ended.

To elevate the arrival of Macy's (an iconic place but still a Macy's), Paley is saying this thing here, this change - from Klein's to Macy's - this matters.

New York City skyline. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

"To be rooted," argued French philosopher Simone Weil, "is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul." Echoing Graham Greene's notion that "One’s future might have been prophesied from the shape of the houses" and Ta-Nehisi Coates' formation of self on the streets of deprived Baltimore, in his words, "another country, fraying at our seams."

Paley nourishes her own roots with verse and shares them with us.

Having Arrived by Bike at Battery Park

I thought I would
sit down at one of those park department tables
and write a poem honoring
the occasion which is May 25th
Evelyn my best friend's birthday
and Willy Langbauer's birthday
Day! I love you for your delicacy
in appearing after so many years
as an afternoon in Battery Park right
on the curved water where Manhattan was beached
At once arrows
straight as Broadway were driven
into the great Indian heart.
then we came from the east
seasick and safe the
white tormented people
grew fat in the
blood of that wound

In revisiting her own experience of Battery Park, Paley expands her empathy toward others' experiences. The poem's title suggests an act intimate to Paley - biking to a park, considering things only she would know. But she finishes with human displacement and alienation.

It is hard to read Paley's poetry without thinking of another New Yorker, Maira Kalman, a playful illustrator who recommends we sit down and quite literally put ourselves in others' shoes.

"If you are ever bored or blue, stand on the street corner for half an hour..." from Maira Kalman's The Principles of Uncertainty.

As we connect in our shared place, we can also attach ourselves to others in different places. Paley shows us how dust on the road and a bit of heat melt together in two disparate locations.

Connections: Vermont Vietnam

Hot summer day
on the River Road
swimmers of the Ompompanoosuc
dust in my eyes
oh
it is the hot wind from Laos
the girl in the Nhe An
covers her face with a straw hat
as we pass she breathes through cloth
she stands between two piles of stone
the dust of National Highway 1 blinds me
summertime, I drive through Vermont
my fist on the horn, barefoot like Ching

By now Londoners and other urban inhabitants carry the memory of social distancing, distant. I quite liked it. Giving another person that two meters is an act of kindness. Share the air, the sidewalk, share my time, share my patience and my need to sit or stand, share my need to get to the counter or rush forward on the bus.

And you share the same with me.

 "Shall I follow for the rest of the day?" Kalman asks, turning this stranger into an identifiable human being.

At the Battery
I am standing on one foot
at the prow of great Manhattan
leaning forward
projecting a little into the bright harbor
If only a topographer in a helicopter
would pass over my shadow
I might be imposed forever
on the maps of this city

I like that Paley has left something for us to see and pick up. Even if we disagree with it. The most impactful poem for me was "Fear."

"I am afraid of nature
because of nature, I am mortal
my children and my grandchildren
are also mortal
I lived in the city for forty years
in this way, I escaped fear."

I feel quite the opposite about the place, but that sentiment - fearing mortality - is certainly something we share.

Grace Paley in 2004 by Eamonn McCabe.

Perhaps we are less connected by place than by how we feel about the place. When Paley writes, “I went out walking in the old neighborhood...” humans across time and space will nod vigorously, having done the same.   For more on revisiting old places and finding them new read The Alienation We Feel When We Return Home, a post about how, in the words of British writer Laurie Lee: “To revisit one's roots calls from an upside-down posture which too often proves that the plant is broken.”

The Nature of This City

Children walking with their grandmothers
talk foreign languages that is the nature of this city
and also this country
Talk is cheap but comes in variety
and witnessing dialect
there is a rule for all
and in each sentence a perfect grammar

For a broader view of our connectedness to and within a place, turn to these considered artists: John Steinbeck's heartbreaking search for an America he once knew, Joseph Brodsky's love letter to his beloved Venice, and Penelope Lively's ruminations on the influence of a more intimate, creative space of her garden (and by that, all gardens and gardeners).