Bodies in Spaces

Take a look at the next pages for some mind organization tricks and an example.

Organizational Map for Self-Narrative

What sense/s are you focusing on?

Summarize the sensory memory here in one sentence:

WHAT is/are the event or events connected to your sensory memory? What are the broader topics/emotions associated with it?

WHO else was there or importantly involved?

WHERE did this take place?

WHEN did this event/experience take place?

Did this experience involve overcoming something difficult or painful? Did it involve learning or growing through a positive experience? Write a bit here about how the experience changed you.

Before this happened, I was…

And after it happened, I was/am …

The Garden State

One night, my thumb was mindlessly clicking through channels I had no plans to watch when I heard this comedian mocking New Jersey’s state motto, the thing they print on the license plates: “NEW JERSEY: The Garden State,” the plate says. It really says that, seriously.

“Shouldn’t it be The Petrochemical and Pharmaceutical Refinery State?” sneered this guy in a shiny suit, sweating all over the mic, grinning like a dog waiting for a Snausage. The audience roared in response, of course.

It’s the ultimate low-hanging fruit when it comes to geographical mocking, maybe only second to joking about how everyone from Alabama is married to their cousins: New Jersey is dirty. New Jersey smells. New Jersey is ugly. New Jersey is the ex-convict, Newport-smoking wannabe half-sibling of New York City. The guy who comes to the family Christmas party heavy on the cologne, light on the actual hygiene, always quietly asking to borrow money he has no plans of paying back.

And look, I get it. If you’re swinging through EWA for an hour on your journey to be an annoying, slow-walking tourist in Manhattan--if you bought the tickets for Newark because they’re cheaper and you’re scared of the trains in from Queens for some reason--what you’ll see isn’t the stuff of Monet’s long afternoons in Giverny. The dirty bird of Liberty International sits in a nest of shipping containers, cranes, smokestacks, and miscellaneous industrial paraphernalia, all floating on the ominously still waters of Newark Bay. Much of the area is surrounded by marshland, the metal landscape bizarrely interrupted by stretches of green grass wafting gently on gasoline gusts, clinging to strongholds of bog—grasses that may or may not be nourished by the slow and inevitable breakdown of human remains, stealthily sequestered in the dead of night.

Or sewage. It might be sewage. We don’t know. Maybe Hoffa’s really under Giants Stadium; maybe he’s not. We just don’t know, and the people who do aren’t talking. Minding your own business is the defining characteristic of the Yankee, wheresoever they may be in the Mid-Atlantic or New England.

But those of us who grew up in Jersey do know a couple of the things, not the least of which is how to survive a 6-lane merge doing 80 because you just realized your EZ Pass is out of funds and you have to pay the toll cash, and screw your life and the lives of everyone around you—you’re not getting off the parkway in the Pine Barrens. People from Jersey know Newark Airport isn’t representative of New Jersey. That acrid cloud of burning fuel and dirty water and waste in general is not the eau de toilette defining olfactory trademark of the entire state. And each of us, if we were asked as spokespeople of specific decades and distinct regions of the state, would pinpoint a different smell for this place we once or currently call home.

My grandfather, Sam Mariani, who grew up on Newark’s 7th Avenue during the Depression, would probably tell you New Jersey’s smell is the heady blanket of incense wafting out of St. Lucy’s, or the sour-sweet odor of yeast in the early morning outside Giordano’s Bakery. Or later, in the 1980s until his death in 2002, the clean scent of the ocean and sailcloth in Rumson, the northernmost point of the eastern coast we generally refer to as down the shore. Meanwhile, my aunt who married into the family and grew up 10 minutes south and 30 years later than Grandpa Sam, would say it’s cigarillo smoke and pork cracklings for mofongo on Grove Street.

The New Jersey I know, maybe on a cellular level if you believe in that kind of thing, starts with the oddly wheat-laden aroma of bovine feces.

“This is your chamber of commerce sales pitch?” you say, but I wonder what you expect. New Jersey is a state of doing, not just being. New Jerseyans grow the tomatoes you put on your “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” These are the people who handcrafted your vacation suntan lotion at Johnson & Johnson, just a few minutes away from where Edison founded General Electric and got a town named after him.

One branch of my family came to northern New Jersey a ragtag, no-name bunch of Irish people who, despite their freight-train-load of impossibly ridiculous superstitions and a general attitude that whatever could go wrong would—these folks nonetheless believed that potatoes could not have possibly turned to slimy, black, hair-clog-in-the-drain sludge everywhere on the planet. There had to be land somewhere that was still game for supporting human life instead of taking it. Like all God-fearing white Christians, they were unperturbed by the fact that the land in question was already inhabited by the Lenape Indians, and when the dim possibility of one day being American landowners in New Jersey presented itself, they boarded the ships and prepared for death or the less probable possibility of something better. Whatever happened, it couldn’t be worse than the English and starvation.