Fourth Places

and an update

First, the update.

Grampy died on August 12th. He was 91, we’d been expecting it for a few months, it was mostly merciful. We fulfilled our promise to bury him in Massachusetts next to his wife.

It’s still strange. On the way to the cemetery, our 7-year-old said, “It would have been cool to see his dead body.” I thought so too, I said, not like in an open casket in a funeral home, but actually as he died, and after.

In August 2019, we moved east to be near Marty, then brought him west in 2020 when it was clear the pandemic was sticking around. As we made those decisions, the only part I could visualize clearly was the actual end of his life. The dying.

I’m pretty sure I’m not afraid of death—of my own departure from whatever this is, of the exiting of others. Of course there’s the sometimes unspeakable pain we feel in the absence of those we love, and often death can include incredible violence, but I mean the actual experience of dying itself. And of witnessing others die. I kinda thought my role in Grampy’s life would be to sit with him while he died at home.

This image was undoubtedly informed by my experience of my mother’s death, which was truly ideal. It’s not what happened with Grampy—we moved him to Portland to be near better medical care, and Ken’s brother & wife, and so the last time I saw him he looked like himself and then we were putting dirt on a wooden box in the ground.

This experience is the norm—witnessing death is not big in American culture. I wonder all the time if it’s fair to ask our minds and hearts to make these kinds of jumps. So much fear is generated when we imagine the things we never got to see. In many ways, my daughter’s comment sounds heartless, but that’s because we already think death has to be bad and sad and not looked at.

Whatever death is, I hope it was painless for Marty. We will continue to integrate that death, and his life, into ours.

***

menu of options

Last weekend, I had the good sense to ask friends if I could use their guest quarters for a night. August is usually a pretty manic month in our touristy place, and this one was particularly dynamic (see above). It had been many weeks since I’d found solitude, and I sensed that a long drive up a mountain might have the same psychic effects as actually leaving on a ferry.

I wasn’t wrong. Other people’s spaces are so pure (when they are), so un-muddled with the detritus of our own lives. It was truly immediate: Headphones, lying on the floor. Journaling. Drawing with rainbow markers, reading books about friendship and sex and death. In minutes, a backlog of adrenal crud left my body. I’d definitely forgotten that in assigned play spaces, I’m a natural.

At dinner we talked about third place, a term coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg, which refers to public places which are all about conversation and community: coffee shops, churches, barber shops, parks. Places that center “the art of hanging out,” as Allie Conti calls it (in this great Atlantic article). Here in America, we’re obsessed with second places (work) and are pretty into first places (home), but we’re shitty at third places. Third places are not about productivity.

Last September, my friend Justine and I went to Europe—my first time to the continent since I was 3. In a delightful bistro in Paris, we ordered steak and the owner asked us to circle a weight (in grams) from his handwritten list of available cuts. He asked about our travels and I told him how I was relishing being in a place where everyone values sitting and talking for hours. “Yes,” he announced proudly, “In Paris, we live the bistro life.”

I was born for the bistro life, am damn good at the art of hanging out. But in the life I currently live, I still regularly write off the tens of thousands of hours of conversation I’ve had as a waste of time, even though I know I wouldn’t be here without them.

If we undervalue the importance of places for collective play, what do we think of playing alone? Solidarity and solitude?

Modern life—and the pandemic-era especially—has radically muddled the boundaries between these spaces. Which place are you in when you work from home? If you write in a cafe, are you in a second or third place? I recently wrote an essay (still floating in the submission ether) about the importance of keeping different areas of our lives separate from one another. I feel this most fiercely about fourth places.

I’ve started and stopped writing countless essays about the beautiful cabin Ken built me a few years ago. Here are the basics: we got together when I was 26 and already knew that if I was going to do partnership, I needed my own space. In an extraordinary act of love, Ken, who happened be a builder, started framing a small cabin on the other side of our property. He heard me, he said: I’ll need to come and go, I’ll need a lot of alone time. Fast forward many years of domestic reality, still no cabin. I’m agitated, about many things, but certainly the lack of alone time. We move away and I lose my shit, then find a space in the city to be part-time away from domesticity, then we start talking about the cabin while 3,000 miles away from it, then we move back and Ken (with the help of our friend Silas) finishes the cabin in a few months.

Here is how I justify the existence of this ridiculous luxury: “It’s my Writing Cabin.” I need it. For the serious business of work.

But it’s not really for that. It’s a fourth place—a place for playing in solitude—which I allowed to be coopted by second place energy when I should have been fiercely protecting it. My relationship to the cabin becomes fraught. I let all the shoulds and what-do-I-have-to-show-for-its in. The play that takes place in the cabin can and may become important work, but maybe I need to take those seeds to the library, which is a very respectable place to get work done.

When I can’t justify the need for the “luxury” of space alone, I think about when I was single. Back then, home (first place) and play (fourth place) were one and the same. I regularly laid out menus of possible activities on the floor in front of the fireplace and dove in. When you live alone, home is what only you want it to be. When you have a family, home is all the things: responsibility and work and solidarity and safety (and expected sex).

It is a luxury, of course, to have my own fourth place. But we don’t need special cabins in order to have fourth places. Fourth places are no internet + art books + good music + absolutely no-one needing anything from you. It could be a tent or a van or a friend’s spare room.

In 2017, when I decided to wean my daughter, I was offered space in a rugged and beautiful cabin in the woods on a different island. I read Mary Oliver in the outhouse and was visited by raccoons in the night. I laid out the menu: ukulele, poetry books, watercolors, a typewriter. Where to begin? I had not experienced a fourth place in years.

I’ve shifted my lenses over the past few years about what creates and saps my life force, have named domesticity and parenting and depression and now, ADHD. They’re all useful for making sense of what makes me feel alive. But today I’m convinced I’ve cracked the code: nothing determines my ability to function in the world more than the presence or absence of fourth places.

Optional Assignment:

Make a temporary fourth place. Work with what you have and get creative. If your house is crowded, maybe the bathroom. If the weather is nice, somewhere outside where no one will bother you. Swap homes with a friend, ask to use their office for a day (if you live near me, use the cabin!). Bring at least 4 activities that you like doing/that challenge you (highly recommended: art supplies and headphones). Lay them out on the floor. Pick something and get silly. Remember, no one is watching you. That’s pretty much the whole point: to hang out with yourself.