Paul Greenberg is an acclaimed nationally-syndicated columnist who has spent most of his life and career in small town Arkansas. A recent column deals with a quality we have been hearing more about lately from the localist movement (see, for example, the Front Porch Republic); namely, “a sense of place.” He says of those who do not have this connectedness to a specific land and community, “they inspire a certain pity, the way anyone homeless does.” (Excerpt and link after the jump.)
What he is describing is exactly what I am experiencing, now that we have moved back to our native Oklahoma.
From Paul Greenberg: A sense of place | News OK:
You have to be careful at Franke’s cafeteria here in Little Rock, Ark., a combination senior center, local eatery and longstanding tradition (founded 1924), or some wild driver like me will drive right over you with his walker. The same goes for Bryce’s in Texarkana, Texas (founded 1931), another local institution. Both have that hard to define but immediately recognizable sense of place.
At lunchtime the other day, a gentleman of a certain age came by my table and paused politely before mentioning that he’d just read my column in the morning paper. Not to be outdone, the lady with him said she’d read after me since I was writing for the Pine Bluff Commercial. They used to live in Wabbaseka, she explained. There you have the combination of time and space that makes for a sense of place. It’s more than just a matter of locale. It includes all the memories that have accumulated there — like so many geological layers.
At a gathering the other evening, someone used the phrase “a sense of place,” but it brought only a puzzled expression from one of the guests. She seemed to think it referred only to her neighborhood. Of course she had a sense of place, she said. She’d lived there for eight years. And before that in other places, though she didn’t go into any detail about them, or even mention their names. It was clear enough that, to her, a sense of place was a sometime thing — transient, variable — and had about as much emotional impact as a change-of-address card.
I was at a loss. As I so often am. How do you explain the sense of place to someone so clearly without one? For it is more than a geographical designation, a sense of place. It has to do with identity, with shared roots not just in the land but in the language, with the look and feel and life of a place. And maybe its death.
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