5/19/2014

I asked Marie an impossible question.  She’s French, you see, and I’m going to be in France not too long from now, and so I asked her, “What is the one spot in France I absolutely must see?,” which is impossible to answer.  Marie did not know how to answer this question; understandably--it is an impossible question.  She furrowed her brow and thought hard, made audible a few umms for the sake of making time, but then she gave up.  “Let me think, I will get back to you.”  

It’s a simple question, but what I asked her was this:  To consider all the places she has ever been to in her homeland, every geotagged memory, and sift through them until the most sacred emerged.  It was phrased in the terms of a Michelin Travel Guide, but I was asking her to reveal her soul.  And I could not blame her for not wanting to do so.  I told her as much, reassuring her that it was an impossible question, that I could never answer it if she turned it on me, asked me about America.  

But the thing is that I could have.  I could have answered that impossible question.  I could have said, “Go to Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes, it’s in northwest Michigan, by a tiny town called Empire, and it is sacred there.  Drive there on a hot summer day, drive from hours away and bake in the sun, drive there with your best friends and listen to Frontier Ruckus and I promise you will feel something.”  I could have told her that it is the only memory of youth that is actually bigger than I remember it--that every other childhood location is smaller, elementary school cafeterias and little league baseball diamonds, but Sleeping Bear has actually grown up with me, and that that is the sign of a sacred place.  I could have answered the question.

But I didn’t answer the question.  I just said, “If you asked me the same question about America, I wouldn’t know what to say.”  I wasn’t about to reveal my soul to her.  And I didn’t really expect her to reveal hers to me, either.