'Place is Destiny" -- Al

The word I see here, feel here, is Destiny. A more theoretical version of the word destination. Does the place I live have to be the destination? I don’t think so. If so, Place is Not Destiny, since Atlanta seems much more like my destination than any place in Alabama does.

For the Alabama that lives inside of me, however, the question expands. Place is also upper-cased here, suggesting that as a Place, Alabama holds a key to some kind of Ultimate Destination, which might be more like what Destiny is. The God of Ultimate Destination is Destiny.

Or maybe the outcome of our interaction with The God of Ultimate Destination is our Destiny. Dictionary.com says:

des·ti·ny ( P ) (d s t -n )n. pl. des·ti·nies
1. The inevitable or necessary fate to which a particular person or thing is destined; one's lot.
2. A predetermined course of events considered as something beyond human power or control: “Marriage and hanging go by destiny” (Robert Burton).
The power or agency thought to predetermine events: Destiny brought them together

Alabama, then, is the beginning of Ultimate Destination, the launch, the Place that by being First, gains inordinate influence, helps put the first spin on the top as it starts spinning. When the top stops spinning, at rarely lands at the place where it started, or even when it does, it is completely transformed by the room it spun through.

Place sets us off on the road of Destiny. It’s like the cone they use to predict where a hurricane goes. The starting place determines part of the parameters, but not the actual path. I did not start life as a Third World-er (though some might debate Alabama’s status in the First World ), nor even a New Englander. I started as a Southerner, as haunted and troubled and buoyed up and supported by those Southern things as Ray Charles was by his mother, and by his relation to the South. He had to be able to write “Georgia on My Mind,” expressing an amazing appreciation for the good things that Georgia represented, to be able to get an apology from the state of its lack of hospitality later on.

Destiny is the Place that pulls you from the Place, pulls you toward itself, that is hard to avoid, hard to face, hard to come to terms with, hard to dance with, but is the dance we all do.

On a broader scale, is the South my Destiny? The place I never left, but merely relocated within. I have often said that I thought it was amazing that the South was able to create a place like Atlanta, the mountain that arises out of the swamp, the place that, by comparison offers clear, clean air and a vista from which I can look back at the Place that launched me on the Road to Destiny.

Returning to the swamp is always an option. And it is a place where bogging down happens. If we find the right boots, or waders, or skis, or stilts, then we can be better equipped to deal with the swamp. If not, we can get swamped, pulled under, if we walk through the wrong places, or don’t look before we turn down the unknown lane.