Yankee Statium as a child w my mother & yankee stadium as an adult with my friends:
OUTLINE:
you will write about a place you love that you have gone to in at least two different time periods in your life and explore how this place connects those two periods. The goal is to create a narrative that explores how this place serves as a meeting point and emotional connection for friendships, family, and other significant moments in your life.
The places we go tend to define us more than we know. Once we step back and begin to reflect on our lives, if we start to think about these places in connection to our memories we often find that there’s one particular kind of place that we’ve frequented over the years that stands out as a significant meeting place. This place functions like an intersection bringing us together with our friends, families, and perhaps more importantly, with ourselves. In “Have I Even Told You About The Courts I’ve Loved?” Ross Gay explores how the basketball courts he played on throughout his life in the different places he lived from childhood through adulthood provided him with a sense of love, friendship, community and allowed Gay to create his own personal mythology about his life and the basketball courts’ place in it. The court runs like a throughline through Gay’s entire life. For you, maybe this place is the soccer field, café, or kitchen.
Things to think about:
Read over how much description Gay uses in his piece. The description allows him to paint these places exactly as they were and it allows him also to describe his emotional connection to the place and the people he met there. This personal narrative essay is a chance to explore places in your life you may not have known carried such significance.
https://lithub.com/ross-gay-have-i-even-told-you-yet-about-the-courts-ive-loved/