You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 23rd, 2008.
Via XKCD.
The conversations always tend to be rather Socratic, as this is my absolute favorite way of handling any topic. Point in case, the aformentioned “natural” activities in mass — if breastfeeding is permissible, then is flatulance (I use that term to, if possible, lend a little credibility to this question)? Both are natural, it’s true — did God not making the gastro-intenstinal system, and is that creation not beautiful? Of course, we reached the conclusion that flatulance was distracting and indencent, but that approach is the most intellectually exciting for me. For every assertion, there must be a “right, but…” to make it more clear, more precise, more truthful.
Mark Shea on Loving A Place For Itself.
I wish I could sympathize.
I live in Richmond, Virginia, and have since 1987, twenty-one of my nearly twenty-four years. I was born in New York, East Meadow in Nassau County on Long Island, same as serial killer Joel Rifkin. I don’t remember it much, though; I have a few scattered memories of life in Flushing, Queens and a vague plane ride down to Virginia, which as a three year-old I found strange and amazing. My family has strong roots in Virginia; my mother was born in Chesapeake, and I’ve been to mass at the church where she was baptized.
My dad’s family is very tied to New York, and my branch is the only branch outside the city (well, my uncle lives in Mount Kisco). But he’s always been a New Yorker at heart, and would talk longingly about Long Island and Yankee games. He missed the city. That’s where he’s from. That’s his home. My mom, too. Though born in Chesapeake, she spent a big part of her life on Long Island, too; her formative years, really, and had a strong accent until I was at least seven. She sounded like Linda Richman on Coffee Talk.
I’ve never been tied to a place. My parents both possess, or at least possessed, a strong New York identity that was passed on to me to the point that once, when I was nine, I wept at having left the place. Even in Virginia, we moved around a lot. From the time I was twelve until I was eighteen, I moved on average once a year. The longest I spent in one place was six years, from six to twelve. I have very little sense of “home” as something immutably mine, some place to which I can always return. The one stable plot of land, the house my grandmother lived in since the mid seventies, has been sold.
I am ungrounded.
It’s one of the reasons I’m so into genealogy. I want to get a sense of where I come from because I have so much difficulty calling any place “home.” And it’s why I’m pursuing my Italian dual citizenship. I have no honest, homegrown patriotism. I love Richmond, but unlike the love Mr. Shea lauds, I would have no issue leaving Richmond for a city with a more felicitous climate, for instance, or less crime. I
It’s a good city, and I am proud of her. It is carved into its own past; every restaurant, every cafe, every clothing store is hewn into the cliff of the past, built in abandoned or burnt out turn-of-the-century mansions and apartment buildings and commercial centers. Its part of its charm. But it’s also squat and humid, and I would not mind cooler locales.
I am not the Napoleon of Oregon Hill.
