Vox Meditantis

What is your favorite place to go in your city?

Monday, 17th November 2025

The boards were slick enough this morning that even Tom slowed his stride. He lifted two fingers from the harbour bench in lieu of making me stop, the Delaware behind him looking like brushed steel under a sky that hadn’t quite decided on daylight. Father Walsh and I fell into step with the caution of people who have both read the risk assessments – literal and otherwise – and chosen to walk anyway.

We talked less than usual. Normally there is a gentle duel for metaphor between us: he claims the river for theology, I reclaim it for psychology, and we agree that grace and neurobiology are not, in fact, natural enemies. Today the conversation kept snagging on the same hidden hook – change – and each of us, in our own vocational dialect, is waiting to see which shoreline we’ll be asked to leave.

Halfway to the point, where the old shipyard cranes stencil themselves against the water like half-erased history, he asked me in that deceptively mild way of his, “What is your favourite place to go in this city?” The question sounded simple enough, like something you might ask a tourist at Marcus’s counter whilst foam settles on their cappuccino. Coming from him, with the river looking like metal learning to soften, it felt more like spiritual direction.

I gave the obvious answer first. Here, I said, waving a hand at the path – the harbour at dawn, before everyone arrives with their dogs and their crises and their phones. He nodded, kind but unconvinced, as if he’d just heard a very competent formulation of the wrong question.

Because of course the real contest isn’t between one scenic vista and another. It’s between the visible harbour under my feet and the invisible one two floors up, in the Victorian office whose windows look onto this same river and somehow manage to make it feel nearer, not further away.

Harbour at first light

If pressed for a postcard, I’d choose this stretch of path every time. The planks remember the shipyard years; the railings smell faintly of salt and rust and whatever ambition left behind when the last freighter pulled out. Tom is part of the scenery now – retired shipyard worker, unofficial harbour docent – his daily circuit a living footnote to every plaque Maggie has ever installed. His greetings are brief, unsentimental, and feel oddly like benedictions.

This is where my days begin: weather check, tide assessment, a quick inventory of anxieties carried forward from yesterday. With Father Walsh beside me, the walk becomes a moving confessional in which neither of us is particularly interested in guilt but both are preoccupied with responsibility. He talks about parishioners considering new postings, congregations in flux, the strange vocational elasticity required of priests of a certain age. I talk – more reluctantly – about pilots and possibilities: museum quiet-hours, stillness rooms, the risk of loosening my grip on the consulting timetable that has held me together for three decades.

The river is the only constant witness. It has seen this town through shipbuilding and casino weekends, opioid surges and mindfulness fads, the arrival of yoga studios where union halls once served stew. On mornings like this it looks almost severe, that brushed-steel surface reflecting our outlines with a clarity neither of us fully wants.

If favourite place meant safest place to think without being interrupted, the harbour path would win without contest. But the question that trailed us back toward town was more complicated: is safety really what I’m choosing, or just what I’ve practised.

Marcus’s table, mid-morning

By eight-thirty, the city narrows itself to the rectangle of Marcus’s counter and the table I pretend I don’t always prefer. The grinder does its small jet-engine aria; the harbour’s industrial soundtrack becomes background to the hiss of milk and the disciplined clatter of cups. Marcus knows my order well enough to tease me about it, which is one of the few forms of fame I’ll permit.

If the harbour path is where thinking begins, Marcus’s café is where feeling is reluctantly admitted into evidence. Jenny drops into the opposing chair when librarianship allows, her scarf an editorial comment on the weather, and begins her usual blend of interrogation and mercy. This morning she reminded me – without preamble – that people in town talk about my rooms as if they were a place in themselves. Not “Catherine’s practice,” but “up at Dr Bennett’s rooms,” the way one might say “down at the harbour” or “over at Elena’s”.

You realise, she said, stirring her coffee with the air of someone delivering municipal news, that your office is part of the city’s infrastructure now. Emotional plumbing. If the harbour floods, we call Kevin and his volunteers; when things break inside people, we say, “Have you thought about going up to see Catherine?”

I tried to deflect with a joke about planning departments and my lack of high-visibility vests. But the comment lodged. Favoured places aren’t always the ones with views; sometimes they’re the ones that quietly carry load-bearing responsibilities.

From Marcus’s window you can see the slight rise of the street that leads to my building. I finished my coffee watching that slope like a time-lapse of my own life: thousands of climbs up those steps, thousands of descents, a kind of private funicular between harbour light and the rooms where people come to risk saying things aloud.

The harbour within the harbour

The office began as a real-estate compromise: a slightly shabby Victorian with high windows and a view of the river, affordable because it needed more love than most clinicians were willing to give their premises. I told myself I was choosing it for the light and the history; in truth, I think I was already looking for a harbour inside the harbour.

Over the years, the rooms have accrued their own quiet weather. The blue chair by the window, angled just enough toward the harbour that people can look out without feeling observed. The bookshelves, half clinical, half confession booth, with a row of seashells along one edge that I call grounding tokens when what I really mean is proof I occasionally leave the building. The bowl of shells on the low table – a magpie’s collection from years of river walks – has become its own kind of liturgy: people reach in, turn a fragment over in their palms, and talk about whatever else in their lives feels similarly weathered.

Jenny is right: the rooms have become a place in themselves, woven into New Corinth’s emotional map. People give directions using my door: Two blocks past Dr Bennett’s, then left at the florist. Teenagers loiter outside after school, not because they particularly want to see me, but because the bench by the steps has acquired the reputation of being safe territory – no one yells there, no one is told to toughen up.

Inside, the work is unspectacular and relentless: fifty-minute harbours in which people dock their lives, unload what they can’t carry alone, and sometimes, very occasionally, manage to set sail slightly lighter. I have spent thirty years trying to be the sort of steady tide-table that lets others risk the weather.

So when I ask myself about favourite places, the honest question isn’t whether I prefer the path or the practice. It’s whether the rooms are my favourite because they are where I am most useful – or because they are where I am most defended.

A fourth room, in gestation

The museum has entered this question like a late but enthusiastic participant. Maggie, with her curator’s sense of history and her conspiratorial sense of timing, asked whether I’d help design “stillness rooms” and quiet-hours in the new wing – a pilot to see what happens when care stops being something you enter by appointment and becomes part of the public furniture.

On Thursdays now, we walk the galleries together before opening, discussing benches with backs (dignity) and wall text that doesn’t shout (mercy). We’re drafting small sanctuary cards that say, in plain language, You are welcome to step out and come back. It is, in essence, the consulting room turned inside out: the same invitation to metabolise feeling, but without the mystique of the closed door and the invoice.

I find myself oddly moved by the thought that somewhere between the Civil War exhibit and the industrial photographs there will be a room whose entire purpose is to let people sit, unproductive and unobserved, until their nervous systems remember how to be human in public again. A harbour, but with explanatory labels and better acoustics.

If the pilot survives the committees and the budgets, those stillness rooms may become my fourth favourite place in the city – a space where my profession is present but not proprietary, where care belongs to the community rather than to my waiting list.

Where I am allowed to be Catherine

By late afternoon, the day had looped through all three of my usual contenders: path, café, rooms. The harbour boards had mostly dried; Marcus’s tables were occupied by laptops and the low murmur of deadlines; the office had done its steady work – sorrow, laughter, anger, all decanted and tucked into notes for tomorrow.

Upstairs, in the flat that sits like an afterthought above decades of other people’s stories, the kitchen table waited with its own quiet claim. It looks out on the same river as the consulting room, but the view is less composed: washing-up on the side, a plant that refuses to obey watering schedules, a chair that still remembers the weight of David’s careful shoulders.

A few weeks ago, after Bartók had finished rearranging our hearts in the old church and the risotto pot had stopped ticking, David stood at this table and washed dishes with the concentration other people reserve for cardiac surgery. Tea towels became a shared language; silence felt less like professional tool and more like truce. It was one of the first times in years that I’d been in a room in this city and allowed myself to be primarily Catherine rather than Dr Bennett.

That, I realised on the harbour path this morning, is the actual through-line. My favourite place is never simply where I can see the water, or where I am most needed, or where the city has quietly built me into its infrastructure. It is wherever I manage – even briefly – to be seen without performance.

Sometimes that happens on the dawn walk, when I admit to Father Walsh that I am more frightened of change than any middle-aged professional with a respectable CV is supposed to be. Sometimes it happens at Marcus’s table, when Jenny refuses to let me hide behind talk of civic resilience, and instead asks who will notice most if I move my Thursdays to the museum. Sometimes it happens in the consulting room itself, when a patient says, very gently, “You look tired today,” and I resist the temptation to deny it.

And sometimes – quietly, improbably – it happens at the kitchen table, with a man who selects wine by asking a bookseller for advice and washes up as if the dishes might bruise.

So if you insist on a single answer for the guidebook, I’ll say the harbour, and mean all its iterations. The path, the café, the Victorian rooms, the museum’s stillness spaces in training, the kitchen where Bartók and dishwater have both worked their peculiar grace. But the more honest answer is this: my favourite place to go in New Corinth is any room in which I let myself arrive as Catherine as well as Dr Bennett – and stay long enough that someone else can tell the difference.

Catherine

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.