“When a lady has a piazza, she has a place on which to sit…,” goes the song that Elsa Lanchester sang in an album of tunes she wrote and performed at soirees in the home she shared with actor-husband, Charles Laughton. The rest of the song is naughty and doesn’t pertain to this essay, but the lines give me a launch into my subject which is “a place on which to sit,” and in particular, special places in which to sit.
Built as we are, sitting is a natural adjunct to just about everything we do. It is one of the first things we learn as an infant, which act draws considerable applause and admiration from our kind. In the early years, we have little choice of where to sit; we are told to sit here and told to sit there. But as we grow older, we begin to select special spots and claim them as our own. These are the places where, alone or in small company, we can do what the human species alone can do — reflect and express.
Special places are legion in literature. Cathy and Heathcliff had their Wuthering Heights moor, Thoreau his Walden Pond. Hemingway called his “a clean well-lighted place”; Steinbeck’s rocky grotto in an old harbor was simply “the Place.” For different reasons, all are based on the assumption that everyone needs a “place,” must, in fact, have one for taking stock, for focusing on the pleasures and pains of present or past, for thinking better and “feeling” better.
A human need is met in such places and the TCU campus, with its large transient population, has no doubt provided many over the years. Bryan Wagner, a student in the forties, knew of a white iron bench near the northeast corner of the campus where the Fine Arts building now stands, a way station on the walk back to his girl’s dormitory after a rendezvous at the corner drug, the bench a quiet place where a moment alone could be captured in those campus-bound, car-less days. Just sitting and holding the hand of someone you love can consecrate a spot forever.
Marcella Sherley recalled not long ago that her particular place was on the steps of the original Mary Couts Burnett Library in view of the sunken garden and lily pond below. At nightfall, the pond’s fountains played with color from lamps mounted beneath the surface and invited reverie and, perhaps, romance.
My earliest recollection of choice spots to sit center around my daddy’s or mother’s laps as they read from old books the words I couldn’t yet, the sounds of poets like Will Carleton and James Whitcomb Riley, the more sophisticated Longfellow, Wordsworth, and Whittier, and the mysterious but beautifully onomatopoetic Poe. I later found other “best places,” the very best of which was up in an old black walnut tree that grew just outside our back door. I thought then that the tree towered endlessly and that I had accomplished somewhat of a feat in climbing up, often with book in hand, to the third round of branches. There was a natural seat up there made out of the juxtaposition of two limbs so that I could sit on one and lean back on the other. I thought I was hidden and wouldn’t answer when Mother called, but I’m betting now that my mother knew of my place and, remembering one of her own, understood and let me be.
The tree is long since gone as is the house on Rogers Street. It was sold to the University Christian Church back in the sixties. I noticed not long ago, however, two black walnut trees that shade a portion of the church parking lot not thirty feet from where mine stood. They are, perhaps, progeny.
Another spot I recall that seemed a natural seat for me in my small days was the fireplug at the corner of Rogers and Cantey streets across from the northern boundary of the TCU campus. By design or mistake, it rose unusually high out of the ground, a perfect perching height. I remember running barefoot up to that corner across the hot pavement, then rough ground where the concrete ended, then hot pavement again, to climb atop the faded red plug and wait to catch sight of my daddy coming, with his rhythmic martial stride, home from his lab, or to watch westward toward Alice Carlson Elementary School whence came my sister, Beth, on school days. Unknowingly then, a 1940s view of the TCU campus was indelibly pressed on the fresh parchment of my memory. The fireplug is still there with its new coat of silver paint, but the view has vanished, having been repainted several times since then.
When I was older and attending McLean Junior High School on Forest Park Blvd. where Paschal High now stands, my friend Jean Barrett and I would go for walks around our TCU hill after school. She lived on Cockrell, just south of Berry Street, and after checking in at home, we would meet halfway across the campus and walk west toward the stadium. It was safe, then and in that place, for young girls to roam abroad. And the hill was our home, the campus a natural part of it.
We went to the stadium to climb high up in the east stands to “our” place to sit and sort out just what we were about at 13, comparing perceptions of the world of which we found ourselves a part. We would sit, “hip to haunch,” and ponder the imponderables like God, morality, families, and boys. The athletic offices were located in the west stadium then, which meant that the stadium gate was usually open for cars — and teenaged girls — to pass through. We felt free to walk in with little fear of being strange in a strange place. I knew Dutch and his host of coaches; I knew the maintenance people like Carl Tyler and the grounds superintendent, Mr. Dees, and they knew me. I recall, too, that TCU electrician Phil Fielding and his wife and son, Buck, lived in quarters under the east stands and would simply wave a friendly hello if they saw us. Old black Johnny Greer might be there, too, to wave a greeting to “Miss Joanie” and her friend.
I’m not sure my parents ever knew I went there. Had he known, Daddy would surely have told me not to because we had no “business” there; Mother would have been more concerned for my safety. Come to think of it, she probably knew, but as with the tree, she let me be.
As I pen a portion of this, I am sitting on a teakwood bench in a newly and nicely landscaped area at the closed-off western end of Lowden Street, directly across University Drive from the Memorial Columns that frame the old Ad Building farther to the west. I know, of course, that the building is called Dave Reed Hall now and for long, but today, in this mood, in this place, it is the Ad Building of old with its six-columned front and ivy-covered walls. You can do that in a place, you can fence off a piece of time and hold it yet again. A fountain bubbles here; the shade invites. It is an oasis on a hot August afternoon on a Texas campus, a nice place in which to sit — to collect and recollect.
©1991 Joan Hewatt Swaim