I was recently in Houston with Glenn to see the International Quilt festival at the George Brown Convention Center in the middle of the downtown. I had been here once before for a different convention but had forgotten how very big it was, looking like a mash up of the Titanic and the world's largest art deco movie theatre.
Anyway, quilts, and more quilts, quilts on a technical level to put me in a corner. Brilliant art quilts and kitty cat cute quilts. Quilts that were twenty feet long and some only a few inches, like my own Beatles quiltlet hanging at the Quilting Arts Magazine booth (I knew I could sneak in a Shameless Plug somewhere). Glenn left me to wander while he found Wi Fi and a coffee shop, so wander I did, all over that convention center until even my arch supports needed support. I liked doing it alone, even though I did run into my friend, Ellie, briefly, as she had a quilt hanging with the SAQA exhibit. Alone I could skim over some aisles and linger at others, browse the vendor booths, admire fabric from all over, be invisible, or strike up a conversation, as I did with the Russian quilters, excited to be there all the way from Moscow.
We were staying each night at Carol and Gordon's house since they were out of country touring Italy, so it was like staying at a high end bed and breakfast for free. Their house is in Sugarland, which although named for the sugar factory that used to be out there, possibly in the middle of lowland nowhere, now seems to symbolize one of those perfect, modern communities full of large houses with lush lawns and overflowing flower beds, swimming pools and endless patios, shady boulevards, fitness centers, brand new shopping malls designed to look like old time storybook main streets, and every food or drink craving accomodated in upscale restuarants and bars, and healthy, trendy grocery stores. Places like that make me feel I am on a movie set. I could easily be spoiled having Whole Foods a few blocks away, a chic sushi bar, a yummy bakery, perfect lattes....And even the people all looked perfect, a casting call for well-dressed suburbanites with a touch of urban cool, of all races and skin tones, in lovely clothes and zippy BMWs.
I could be spoiled and yet, I sensed that inner unease even after a short visit. Everything is so new, and looks like it will keep being updated and remodeled to keep it new. No weathered surfaces, no faded paint, no banged up cars with crazy bumper stickers, no nostalgic landmarks, no character, no real history. And that was what I was sensing. While I'm no fan of urban decay or redneck neighbors with cars on blocks and miles of weeds, I have what I can only describe as a psychic sense of place. I can feel layers of history, the imprint of many souls, the joy and sorrow of certain places, the palimpsest of time and space. Some cities work to cultivate that: New Orleans, Savannah, Santa Fe, San Francisco, but sometimes it just happens. You walk down a certain block, you enter a new place, and there is that patina, that folding of one era into another, that sense of those who came before like a trace of perfume after someone has left a room.
While not everything old needs to be saved (please tear down the Seventies wood paneling all over the world) and there's nothing like a brand new set of bath towels to lift the spirit, some sense of place needs to happen to make a place feel livable and lived in. Maybe that's a European sentiment. Maybe Americans are so forward looking (unless they listen to Rush Limbaugh) that they prefer all new, all the time. Old is depressing, it's your grandmothers faded wallpaper and saggy couch, it's the cash for clunkers Buick in the garage, it's the so-called antique shops that only carry old, useless junk from long dead people. That's the other side of of that palimpsest, the shabby, trashy, ugly and sad remains of a long gone era.
Don't get me wrong. I like new. New ideas, new inventions, new ways of problem solving. Yay 21st Century! I am progressive and hopeful. I get vaguely irritated with chain e-mails I receive extoling the good old days. They start out innocently enough: Hey! Remember wax lip candy and Chatty Cathy dolls, Ed Sullivan and the Jack Paar Show, but underneath is that subtext that pretends all was wonderful and perfect back then (if you were white and middle class), ignoring the racism, the sexism, the hiding of spouse and child abuse, the slavish conformity. And let's not forget that the 20th century was one of the worst in history. Two world wars, the cold war, Hiroshima, the Iron Curtain, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, tin pot dictators galore, colonialism, Imperialism, Vietnam. Some people may have lived in their Leave it to Beaver world, but they were just hiding in their own little Sugarland, only not even racially mixed, just a white bread preserve, blinders in place.
So I don't even know what I am railing about, some discomfort with a place that has no sense of place, that will be replaced tomorrow with another perfect, spotless place to live where no one's car is more than two years old. Maybe I am uncomfortable with myself for contemplating what it would be like to live in a place like that safe from poverty and decay. I'd feel like Prince Siddhartha in his palace. And yes I live in a pretty house and drive a nice little 2004 SUV and make my lattes every morning, but even my neighborhood has some Wabi Sabi. I don't know if beer cans on my lawn counts as neighborhood 'character', but I like the decades of houses, the quirky mix of people, the cracked floor of the local coffee shop, the mix of eras and styles in the houses, no two alike. Then I feel at home. It's no Santa Fe but then even Santa Fe has grown its own Sugarlands at the edges. Shiny, new faux adobe mansions. Maybe it's inevitable. Maybe in 50 years Sugarland will have a history. Or it will be completely rebuilt new over old. Texas is like that. Hard, bright, shiny, and new. We saved the Alamo but you can barely see it for all the high rise buildings around it.
