Places Not Seen

Places Not Seen

We get older and older, and perhaps not wiser, every day; in some ways the limits on our time and capabilities will define how we will not see all the marvelous or not so marvelous sights and places around the world. We cannot see and do it all. Some see more than others.

I have a calendar hanging in my office that has a March 2016 page section of Uzbekistan, replete with sumptuous photographs of places in that far off, forgotten country, located in the middle of the world's most massive continent, that is under the rubric of "1,000 Places to See Before you Die".

Even if we were to visit the author's thousand places of her choice and fancy, aren't there another 20,000 places to go, visit, take in, and behold? To wit, see?

It is rather unending. That's good, but it might seem frustrating at the same time.

But that is why we watch movies, and television, and look at pictures and regard momentos of others, and listen to their stories, encounters, and experiences, and read books and share all these places in every medium in order to see more.

We cannot go ourselves, but the rest of humanity allows us to peruse it vicariously.

Those of us with eyes and sight and desires to see more, we take in what we can or what we are interested in.

But did you go there? Did you see it with your own eyes?

There are many, many places where you may never go yourself.

When will you start on the next place?

I recently read a novel involving mostly Cape Cod and a few locations in California, but it alludes to Maine a bit, through memories of the characters and then finally ends on the rocky coastline, more or less.

I have read most of the Lee Child Jack Reacher novels, which also involves a story on the Maine Coast. Some of my family members went there when I attended college in Utah in the 1990s. I heard stories of Maine most of m life, with parents and aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents from nearby Massachusetts. My grandma Nellie, my mother's mother, apparently lived in Maine and was going crazy there until she returned to her native Massachusetts. I think they lived in the interior, maybe Poland Springs, or Polish Springs...

I have seen some of the interior of Maine. I stayed the night in Bangor in 2016 with my family, and the drive up till then was indeed picturesque.

But I have not been to the coast of Maine.

It remains among the places I have not seen in person, like Uzbekistan.

I have seen across the river Amu Darya into Tajikistan, however.

But that is only the edge, only the beginning, and there is only so much time and money in this life.