Old Places

My new apartment-- a modest, one-person studio that I moved into just this past week-- is old. By American standards, at least. I'm not a student of architecture by any stretch of the imagination, and it would be both foolish and arrogant of me to try to date it precisely, but my current thinking is somewhere around 60 to 70 years, which would make it a Depression-Era building. That feels about right; something about the place screams "WPA". The floors are old and scratched, the walls cracked in places, and the deeply-stained wood trim darkened even further by age. It feels like the kind of place a soldier would return to from Europe, the kind of place where women with henna-washed hair and men in broad-lapeled shirts and too-thin neckties would dance to old swing tunes, the kind of place where spaghetti-fed stereotypes would go to the mattresses at in some bizarre, Midwestern mob war. If you sit still, you can hear the building creak on occasion, or smell the faint aroma of generations of cheap meals cooked in the tiny kitchen.

I am reliably informed that, despite the fervent longings of countless books and movies, real artists don't live in studio apartments. If I had been so inclined, I could probably have found someplace bigger, nicer, newer, cheaper, or even closer to where I wanted to live. This was the first place I looked, and I knew instantly that it would be the last. I like old things.

We as a people have a tendency to tear down old things. It seems, from what I've read or heard from others (because unfortunately, I am not nearly so well-travelled as I'd like), to be a very American trait. (I used to find that odd, such a casual relationship to the past from a country so in love with its own history. I've decided that we as a nation are not in love with our past, but with the idea of our past. Probably because ideas are clean, while facts tend to be messy and disturbing.) We tear down anything more than a few decades old, to make room for something newer (which we automatically equate with "better"). We talk about old things in terms of thirty years, or forty. In other places they talk about old things in centuries. My favorite place in all the world is my grandparents' farm, in northern Missouri. The house there is just entering its second century, and doing fine. My grandmother-- who has lived there for fifty years and never once thrown anything away-- has covered every wall, every shelf, with curios and antiques and souvenirs from events that happened generations ago. If you walk into that house, you can feel the history inside. It's almost palpable.

There's a term that I've always loved: "psychometry". It refers to the ability to divine information about an object's past just by being near it, or touching it. I like to think that objects have memories, maybe much longer, richer ones than our own, and that they could share those memories with us. That you could touch a book and know all the people who've read it, or stand in a room and feel all those who have lived there before you. It's a nice idea.

Standing in my new old apartment by myself, listening to the building and breathing in its scent, I know better. But I like to pretend. I like to think that all those old memories are still in there with me. There's a history to all old places. I like to think that I can be part of it.