All the Place You've Got

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.” 
― Flannery O'Connor , Wise Blood

It's not the usual way of English words to carry so many meanings. English takes on what it needs as it goes and is just as likely to add a word as to use the same one in multiple senses. Ours is not, by it's nature an evocative language. Ambiguity, at least as I was taught by the noble spinsters and widows of my childhood classrooms, is no friend to accuracy, and accuracy of expression was the highest good.  To be misunderstood was most often the fault of speaker not the listener. Say what you mean. Be honest -- but not rude. If you don't have anything nice to say... you need to work on your vocabulary.

The most immediate meaning I know of place is all to do with home. My grandparents used the word to give directions, "... up to the old Sopher place and turn right at the stand o' pine there." The Sophers, by the way may have given up their tenancy and the ghost long before the listener was born, but no matter. "Went by your Dad's place the other day" I still hear from friends back to home for a visit.  Place in this sense is both familiar then and a little formal where I grew up; the assumption of ownership, a little land, time.

Might mention here, My Brother's Place is the name of the bar where they've held my last two class-reunions. I did not attend.

For my mother, my sister, and my sister-in-law, place most often means a table-setting and if needs be a bed. If they know you, or you know somebody they know, there's always a place for you. Hungry or not, there's a plate. Fresh sheets on the sofa if there's nowhere else to lay your head. When a high school friend was thrown out of his home for reasons that sadly seemed obvious to us all at the time, and even though my parents may not have approved of him entirely for that same reason, he was welcome to stay as long as he needed. What you do.

For my father place could also mean good work or bad, but steady. It was always good news when someone found a place in the shop. And a job meant a place of your own someday, if the pay was enough and that was good too. I never thought but that I would find a place of my own in both ways when I grew up.

Another of my father's places was less happy in that he raced coon dogs and of "win, place, or show," place was often as near as he came to the prize. The story as he told it usually had more to do with men than dogs. He had some good ones, some that weren't. Loved dogs either way. When the good ones lost though, and it was often the case, someone put in a fix, or called the thing for their friend instead of the winner, or a line-judge was just "g-d" blind. It is the way of things. Effort and skill don't guarantee a damned thing. Why that dog only placed.. Everybody knows it, not supposed to say it, but damn.

"It's not your place to say..."

That's the place with which I am exercised just now.

When I was in the seventh or eighth grade, the boat people were very much in the news. At the ignoble end of the American war in Vietnam, you may remember, refugees first in their hundreds and then in their thousands crowded onto any boat they could find in an attempt to escape the victorious Communists. Night after night Walter Cronkite and the others showed the boat people in their desperation, waiting for rescue, salvation, waiting for their old allies and employers the Americans to save them from the sea. We all saw them. TV showed the living and the dead. That was new. Shocking and heartbreaking. I remember the efforts to save them. I remember the kindness and generosity of some Americans who would eventually welcome the refugees into their communities. I remember too the racism and the hatred with which some of us rejected the effort.

In response to a negative editorial in the newspaper, I wrote a letter. What was I? Thirteen? The newspaper printed my letter. I don't have a copy anymore. Can't tell you what I said, or how badly I might have said it. Still, they ran it.

It wasn't that my parents weren't proud of me, but they were embarrassed. It wasn't my place to tell off newspaper editorial writers. It wasn't my place to talk politics in public or to lecture my elders on their moral shortcomings.

They weren't wrong.

But then, neither, as I remember it, was I.

And there the matter ended.

I thought of this not long ago when refugees became news for Americans again. What place do these people have? What place do we make for them? Whose place is it to say?

The essayist Rebecca Solnit says that places are more reliable than human beings. Seems true, but only if and when a place is allowed us, no? My sense of place is in the people I love. That's where I've found home. Hasn't so much mattered where I was so long as I was with the family I have and the friends I've made.

The place where I grew up is not a place where I would choose to live. For all the security I had in my family, the place I knew as a child was hostile to the person I was to become. I sensed it early on, long before I knew who I might actually be. Nothing I've seen there since has told me I was wrong.

The places where I've lived since have been better suited to me, and I to them, but even where I am now I don't entirely trust to be safe hereafter. I recognize where we are now. I remember. I have seen these angry faces before. I've heard hate. I know the sound, even when the words aren't the ones I remember.

My discomfort in the place we are isn't personal anymore. Can't be. I know who and where I am. I am lucky in this. Others aren't.

This isn't about winning.

Can't blame anyone else for the place we are, who we might become, to what horrors we seem eager to revert. Here we are. What shall we do about it?

I must make a place at my table, just as I was taught.

This is the place I've got.

This is the place we've got to.

Say so.

“This is the place of places and and it is here," said Gertrude Stein. That seems worth fighting for.