“Someone told me years ago that I should always have a place in my mind where I could imagine myself happy, so that when I wasn’t happy I could go there.”
Ann Patchett
Tom Lake
One of the prompts I often gave my students was “Write about a favorite place from your childhood.” It was intended as an exercise in descriptive writing, but it often elicited deep emotions and vivid memories. After all these years I remember a piece that one student wrote about his grandmother’s house with a big front porch he could crawl under. It was dark and cool, and he could eavesdrop on the conversations seeping through the floorboards of the porch. He felt safe there and because no one knew where he was, he was free – for a while – from the intrusive demands of adults.
I’ve come to call these happy places. They fall into at least four different categories: places you’ve been to only once, but the impression they’ve left makes you happy; places from your past (childhood) that you no longer have access to; places you have access to only intermittently, e.g. during summers; and places you can enter any time you feel the need. I’m going to visit here my own happy places in each category. I hope they will unearth some memories from your own experience.
- 17 or 18 years ago Rosellen and I made our one and only trip to Hawaii to attend a wedding on the island of Maui. Heading back to the airport at the end of a wonderful stay, we stopped at a restaurant called Mama’s Fish House. Although the name conjures up an image of a shack precariously tilting to one side, in fact the restaurant was attractively appointed, with tables arranged around a busy bar. It was situated just yards from the ocean and had its own private beach onto which you could wander before, during or after your meal. Sea breezes wafting in through open windows eliminated the need for air conditioning.
It was the first time I had eaten raw fish, so common now in sushi restaurants. Each slice was infused with the taste of the ocean from which it been snatched. Every variety of fish on the menu included the name of the local fisherman who caught it. It was definitely one of my all-time best meals.
I will never return to Mama’s Fish House, but I revisit it sometimes when I have my blood pressure taken. I close my eyes and am transported back to Maui, a visualization that buys me at least 10 points on the blood pressure gauge.
2. For almost 25 years, we spent part of our summers in a New Hampshire house owned by a dear friend who lived in it only occasionally but was happy to share it with friends. The house is connected with many memories of grand dinners, parties marking big number birthdays, even the joint bat mitzvah of our daughter and the owner’s daughter, born 3 weeks apart.
3. I could write for pages about the interior of the house, but I want to focus on a spot outside that is my true Happy Place. There’s a lawn in the back that is the size of a Little League baseball field and requires about the same amount of effort to keep it from returning to the wild. I seized every opportunity to sit out there pretending to read, but really staring at the surrounding trees, listening to the occasional bird calls and the buzz of circling flies. It’s the closest I’ve gotten to the kind of peace that meditation is supposed to offer. It’s my other visualization that buys me blood pressure points. Through many cold Chicago winters that image has sustained me until the next NH return. Unfortunately, that option died this summer when the house was sold.
Now to a place much closer to home, a place we can experience any day, only a ten-minute drive away. The Midway is an attractive strip of green that runs along one edge of the University of Chicago campus. It was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and was the site of many of the international exhibits in the Columbian Exposition of 1893. Just to the south of The Midway, there’s a narrower strip of tree-lined greenery that faces a number of important university buildings that have overflowed the main campus to the north, including the Law School, the School of Social Work and the public policy institute.
Just across from the Law School The University has invested in a major landscaping project, which includes a sheltered area of benches, surrounded by trees and shrubs that can’t be found anywhere else on campus. It’s there that we go at the end of days of too much screen viewing. We take our reading and our water bottles for an hour or two of uninterrupted focus. We can hear the traffic on adjacent streets but otherwise there’s just birdsong, the wind in the trees and the occasional sound of the carillon from the nearby Rockefeller Chapel. Apart from an occasional dog walker passing through, we can pretend that this is our private space, ours to use until the temperature drops to the point of discomfort. It has no official name; for us it’s just The Happy Place.
I will save my childhood happy places for another time. For now I just want to celebrate the special places that carry an unusual charge of peace, well-being, beauty and wholeness into our lives. When I stand up to leave my happy places, I’m caught between my gratitude for their existence and regret that I have to go. Sounds like a metaphor for something larger, doesn’t it?
