“He was as curious about her static world as she was about his wandering one.”
- Tim Gautreaux, Same Place, Same Things
Reading Same Place, Same Things I’m reminded of old country music. Old country music. The kind of country that still has its roots in folk songs and has a little bit of the classic twang we associate with country, but it’s a smoother, 50’s pop sound too (I’m absolutely thinking about Patsy Cline). But these songs have a melancholy about them, either in the melodies or in the lyrics that makes them beautiful, but with an uncontrollable sorrow that seeps through mixed with some acceptance of this being the way of life.
And being in Lafayette and going to Tom’s Fiddle and Bow it’s easy to see just how important music is. There’s that line that’s always passed around in musical theater about ‘when you can’t speak, you sing, and when you can’t sing, you dance.’ So, when you’re stuck whether by chance or by choice in rural places, how do you express yourself? If you love, or you hurt, or if you feel and you have no one to tell, don’t you sing? You can sing to people and for people and with people. You can play instruments with people, and you can dance with them, and really, how much better can it get than to connect musically with the people around you?
Our experience at Tom’s shop was enough to show us this and to let us experience it. It was almost magical the way our class, bags of food in hand and city personas squeezing tight into a house already full of people and bursting at the seams with instruments. And there’s music slowly starting up, and before we know it, it’s like we’re being swept away into a utopia where everyone is talking and playing music, listening and dancing.
This isn’t all to pretend that places like these are fantastical utopias of music and laughter and Southern charm. This whole scenario thrives off the back of hundreds of years of enslavement, segregation, and the abuse of disenfranchised people. It’s impossible to see that moments like these are backed by histories of harm.
But through all of this, even with the music playing and the singing and the dancing, it’s the people that matter the most. The people you surround yourself with, and the people you choose to sing with. I enjoyed meeting Rick and Rod and Tom and everyone else, but we’ll drift out of their lives perhaps just a bit slower than we entered them. So, I look at the people I’ve experienced this once-in-a-lifetime trip with and they’re playing music, talking, learning how to dance, and it’s hard not to wish this could last a lifetime. There’s melancholy in that too.
All the books that we’ve read over this trip, they all share that quality: the importance of the people around you. When we read The Awakening, it was just as much about other people as it was about Edna’s finding herself. It took other people in her life to make her realize her own wants and desires, and to pursue those choices whether other people thought they were the right or wrong decision. And like a lot of other people on this trip, I saw myself in Edna too, and I’m glad I started out this journey like that. To emphasize the self and treasure individuality before incorporating yourself into a group, I feel, makes you a more open to understanding and loving the people around you because you stand on your own first to be able to help the people around you.
Interview with a Vampire – well, Andrew’s probably had enough of what I had to say about that book in my essay, but Louis’ everlasting despair all revolves around the fact that he has lost so many people in his life (death?). Anne Rice gives her vampires human qualities so that we can relate to them and view them as more than ‘children of the night’ (say that in Bela Lugosi’s voice!). And what’s more human than loving other people? Louis, as much as he despises Lestat, is devoted to him. Louis’s devotion to Claudia is heartbreaking and he’s, “hopelessly her lover.” People, or vampires, are just as important for living as any physiological needs.
Although I struggled a bit with Coming Through Slaughter, I was more in love with the people that preserve these histories. The beauty with which Ondaatje characterizes Buddy Bolden, preserves his history and helps a movement to recognize his influence on music blossom. And I loved how my classmates loved this book too, how they interacted with Ondaatje’s writing in so much more perceptive and intelligent ways than I could, and through I had a hard time, it was their views that made me realize it’s importance and find the beauty in it despite not understanding.
I know this one wasn’t well liked, but The Moviegoer! This was my silent favorite. How could you put a book about movies in front of me and tell me not to like it? Even though almost no one in this book was likeable, the message it carried made me love it. It’s a romantic’s book that juxtaposes existentialism with the solution of just finding smaller things in life that make you happy. Life doesn’t have one big answer, and it’s okay if life is just going to school, going to work, taking a trip to New Orleans, or watching a movie. Seeing the people around you eat the food they love, buy the things they like, interact with other people, even with just a look. We’ve all worked through problems with each other on this trip, and we’ve all come out better people even without finding some large meaning to life. I’ll love everyone on this trip until the skin on the backs of their hands turn translucent too.
A Lesson Before Dying; if you want a book about people, this one is it. I actually struggled with liking Grant as the main character more than any of the other novels, perhaps because I had committed to loving other people so much with their flaws included that I was face with difficulty trying to justify the way Grant treated the people around him. Even though I never felt that he completely came around like Binx did in embracing the people around him (for a multitude of justifiable reasons), he found his way through life with the help of other people, in an Edna-ish sort of way.
And Same Place, Same Things. I’ve only read a few of the stories from Gautreaux’s collection, God knows I’m probably avoiding it because I don’t want the trip to end. What do I have to look forward to after today? The same life I’ve lived for 19 years already?
But I don’t think that’s the point. It’s never the same life, never the same things. Even the same bench, or table, or rusty fence looks different from day to day. It might seem all the same, but the people in your life can change that. They can help you find beauty, and self, and joy, if you only let them and if you want that change.
We all owe so much to Andrew for giving us this opportunity, letting us meet and find our ways to each other. And we owe so much to each other, for listening, being there, and bringing joy to each other’s lives.
Change is bittersweet – and endings too. But even the same places and same things every day after today will be better because we found each other.
