In Everybody’s Autobiography, Gertrude Stein wrote, “There is no there there,” in reference to a trip she took to her hometown of Oakland, California in 1933, after living as an ex-patriate in Paris for some 30 years. Stein came back to Oakland to find that her childhood home had disappeared, along with her school, her park, and her synagogue.  It took me a few readings to embrace Stein’s meaning. The more I dug into these five simple words, the further my mind reached into its own treasure trove of “there.” I began to reflect on all the places that exist so vividly in my memory and that I store in my being, yet can no longer be found on a map.

Gertrude Stein had a way with words and with people. She was well known for her writing, her art collection (which included Picassos, Cezannes, and Matisses aplenty), and the salon she hosted at her home in Paris. Fellow writer Sherwood Anderson (who died from swallowing the toothpick in the olive in his martini and whose epitaph read Life, Not Death, is the Great Adventure) put it best when he said, “For me the work of Gertrude Stein consists in a rebuilding, an entirely new recasting of life, in the city of words.”