Optimistic Moves

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I’ve been thinking about moving lately.  No, not planning to move, but just thinking about the process.  A family member recently moved, and we have new neighbors in the house next to ours that sat empty for a few months.  In both these cases the people moving are young and, I sincerely hope, optimistic.  Settling into a new place takes quite a lot of energy and pondering my own life, a serious motivation.  It wasn’t so hard when I was young and all I had acquired were books and records.  After moving to college I ended up shifting around quite a bit, each time looking for a better fit.  I moved five times in my three years in Boston.  When I moved to Ann Arbor to be with my betrothed, and then wife, I moved twice in a year.  Then in Scotland, three times within three years.  Each move was optimistic.

Back in the States, we moved four times in three years until we ended up in the house Nashotah, well, House provided.  That was our home for a decade or so and the move was optimistic.  Something happened after that, however.  The move from Nashotah was a step down.  And the move from the first apartment to the second was another step down.  Neither were optimistic moves.  They were middle-of-life, disrupted-life moves.  The perspective was hoping nothing tragic would happen.  The move to New Jersey was quasi-optimistic.  It was very difficult for me to give up my dream of a teaching career—something I had, and then lost.  Still, our place, a floor of a two-family house, was good enough for a dozen years.  Our last move, to our own house, was optimistic but fraught.

Home ownership is a shock to the system best absorbed by the young.  To make matters more interesting, I recently talked to somebody who knows about finance who said buying property isn’t always the best investment.  He urged us to go back to renting.  I have a hard time imagining that now.  Landlords are their own species of problem.  Yes, we’re responsible for repairs and insurance, and lately lots of snow shoveling, but we don’t have an owner telling us what we can’t do.  (Having finances tell us what we can’t do is another matter.)  I always look fondly on the young who move, trying to tap into their optimism.  This place, I very much hope, is better than the last one was.  There is no perfect place to live, I know, but when you start thinking about it, it should be a matter of hope.  And hope should be in greater supply these days.

The Storm

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I suppose it would be a fool’s errand to post today on anything other than the storm.  You know the one.  The snow/ice storm that has been affecting the greater part of the lower 48 for the last couple of days and is now set to target the most populous region of the country.  Power outages are expected (so if this blog goes utterly silent, you’ll know why).  Good thing FEMA has been dismantled by the Trump administration.  In any case, we’re all waiting to see what the outcome will be.  I guess we should ask AI.  In any case, our lives have become so completely tied to a constant source of electricity, we barely know how to get along without it.  I have to admit to being a bit puzzled myself.  Without electricity, the heat goes off.  The water pipes freeze up and burst, and a personal apocalypse ensues.

As my wife is fond of saying, the weather is still in charge.  A storm like this shows how fragile our infrastructure can be.  Especially since the last ten years of US history have been dealing with Trumpism or its aftermath.  And one thing that our elected officials don’t do well is deal with reality.  Nation-wide storms do occur.  Democrats do not control the weather.  The “woke” don’t have some great machine buried somewhere generating all the hot air that ultimately leads to global warming which, we all know, is really real.  And so we sit here waiting for the silence to come.  Funnily, having grown up in the Great Lakes snow belt, I remember these kinds of snow amounts not infrequently as a child.  Our house was little more than a shack and it was heated by a  single furnace in the living room, vented mainly by the leaky roof and drafty windows.  Besides, my step-father drove the borough snow plow.

Today things seem much more brittle.  What would we do without Netflix for a day?  And snow days from work are a thing of the past.  Offices never close because they never have to.  As long as the juice flows.  That is reality here in the world of 2026.  I can envision a different world.  One that might be a little more sane and focused on protecting one another instead of one percent of the richest one percent getting even richer.  A world in which snow is pretty instead of some insidious threat.  A world where being human is sufficient for the troubles of the day.

Trying to Write

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Realizations dawn slowly sometimes.  From childhood on I wanted to be a writer.  Teachers encouraged me because I seemed to have some talent, but in a small town they didn’t really know how to break through.  Besides, terrified of Hell, I was very Bible and church focused—not really conducive to the worldliness needed to be a writer.  The realization that recently dawned is that I’m competing with people who can put full-time into writing.  I’m trying to squeeze it into a couple hours before dawn every day because 9-2-5.  9-2-5.  9-2-5.  It’s exhausting.  I often read about writers, wondering how they get noticed.  Even the people I try to get to publish my fiction read stuff others likely have more time to write than I do.  Why do I keep at it?  Sometimes it’s just impossible to keep ideas inside.

I’ve got ideas.  Some of them would make fascinating movies.  I even had an editor of an online journal that published one of my stories say that.  I’ve got a cinematic imagination trapped in the aging body of a day-worker.  Oh, I’ve got a professional job, of course.  What I really want to do is “produce content.”  I know others in publishing with the same dream.  One of my colleagues has managed to break out and she’s now publishing novels that are getting noticed.  I’m still writing for academic presses because I know how to get published by them.  My fiction has been suffering from neglect.  To stay sharp you have to keep at it.  I’m a self-taught writer.  I’ve not taken a course in it my entire life, and it probably shows.  Not even Comp 101.

Fairness is a human construct and ideal.  Reality lies with Fortuna (cue Carl Orff).  I’m better off than most people in the long human struggle with equity, I realize.  For that I’m grateful.  I do have to wonder, however, if struggle isn’t essential to making us what we need to be.  The writers whose work endures often had to struggle to get noticed.  Many died in obscurity.  I wonder if they ever realized that they were leaving a legacy.  You see, writing is a strange blend of arrogance and self-doubt.  Many of us go through intensely self-critical times when even our published books seem to mock us from their shelves.  The realization, now fully day, that I will always have to struggle to do what I know I’m meant to do sheds light.  Even in the world of privilege, the struggle inside is real.

Literalism

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I struggle with literalism.  It may be naïveté.  I’m not sure there’s a difference.  I grew up being unsure of anything.  This isn’t unusual among those in an alcoholic family.  It’s probably the reason I spent my teenage years, praying as fervently as John Wesley for certainty with my faith.  My gray matter simply wouldn’t allow it.  I’m skeptical, with advanced training in critical thinking, but still terribly naive.  A family member recently told me something that sent me into a mini-panic.  It was only when I realized that he was being ironic that my ruffled feathers began to smooth out into flight readiness.  And that’s just one instance.  I used to tell my students, when we pick up something to read the first question in our minds is one of genre.  What is this?  Is it fact or fiction?  Serious or satire?  With interpersonal interactions it’s not always so clear.

People are natural actors.  They have to be.  Family time is quite different from alone time.  At least it is for me.  I try to shelter those I love from the darkness, but sometimes it surfaces.  I literally don’t know who I am.  There’s a certain continuity to the “Steveness” of my everyday existence, and that essence, for lack of a better word, accepts many things literally.  I trust people I know.  For the most part, I trust those I meet in their professional capacities—the store clerk, the mechanic, the professor.  I realize that they have inner lives as well, and they may or may not be unfurling the banner for all to see.  We all have filters.  Some use them more regularly than others.

My knee-jerk literalism generally lasts only a second or two.  My brain catches up and says, “this is where your critical thinking should kick in.”  Often that works, but it’s tied in with emotion as well.  The human thought process is certainly not all logic or reason.  Even the most Spock-like among us have emotion constantly feeding into our thoughts.  That’s one reason that artificial intelligence isn’t possible.  Those who think they can logic their way through falling in love are sadly mistaken.  We can’t explain it because we don’t understand it.  And we’re nowhere near being able to.  For business dealings we expect literalism.  But then there’s always the fine print.  I’m not that naive.  I do struggle with my literalism.  It’s set me on the wrong path before.  But certainty still eludes me.

Stories in the Snow

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Birds are quite capable creatures, but some have learned that by hanging out around human dwellings, some of our species give handouts.  For me, the sight of a cute little junco shivering outside the window leads me to break up the hardened bread slices that I save for them and toss them outside when things are either buried in snow or ice.  This year we’ve had a bit of ice and some snow on top of it, which makes a kind of canvas for seeing who’s come to visit our crumbs.  My daughter pointed out to me that we had some feather prints as well as footprints, so I thought I should go ahead and record them.  If this were mud and a few million years had passed we’d perhaps have ended up with fossilized feathers.  And nature’s canvas is endlessly beautiful.

I imagine people tend to be partial to birds because they look so delicate and fragile.  Well, at least the little ones do.  Our natural sympathies make us feel sorry for them when nature makes finding food difficult.  The survivors among them, however, are tough.  Birds skirmish over food and can be quite aggressive around both a bird feeder or a crumb pile.  They were, after all, once dinosaurs.  And around here winter locked in before Christmas and has stayed around for quite some time, temperatures barely rising above freezing for many days in a row.  And I look for feather prints in the snow.  Try to find the beauty in the starkness of harsh weather (while looking askance at the energy bills).  Our animal companions can teach us much about life.  Their stories leave traces for us to follow.

Our species has often tried to advance itself at the expense of others.  I think of the tremendous environmental damage that we’re willing to inflict to enable AI.  What pollution we’re willing to dump out for using fossil fuels.  How much forest we cut down for our own use.  We drive vulnerable species extinct.  This makes me think of those creatures that have adapted to us.  Who speaks highly of rats, pigeons, or cockroaches?  Even sparrows, which can be quite aggressive, or even mean, reflect our attitudes toward the rest of nature.  I’m sure some sparrows come for the crumbs, even though I put them out with the juncos in mind.  Those that appear here in winter have likely migrated from even further north.  They handle cold I have difficulty tolerating.  And they leave art in the ephemeral snow.

Welcome 2026

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I put great stock in holidays, but I’ve never felt a deep connection to New Year’s Day.  I’m more of a morning person than the stay up late sort, and the New Year also seems cold after the coziness of Christmas.  But here we are in 2026 nevertheless.  We’re encouraged to look ahead.  I’m not much of a corporate person and I don’t see much wisdom in devising five year plans in an unpredictable world or any such nonsense.  The way things have been going in the news, it’s hard to have a five-day plan that bears any resemblance to reality.  But New Year’s Day does seem an appropriate season for optimism.  Hope stands here, anticipating better days ahead.  I am, despite appearances, an optimist.  I do believe in progress and the calendar keeps on ticking over regardless.  What will 2026 hold?  Who knows.  Best to take it one day at a time.

For me personally, I’ve got a couple books nearly complete and I do hope to find publishers this year.  And I’ve got many others started as well.  Writing is an act of optimism.  I’m always touched when someone lets me know they’ve found my work interesting, or even helpful.  Someone once contacted me to let me know Holy Horror had helped them through a difficult time.  This made me happy; writing books is a form of connection.  When I read books—a major planned activity for 2026—I’m connecting with people I don’t know (usually).  Writing to me feels like giving back.  The funny thing about it is the tension of having little time to do it seems to make it better.  I always look forward to the break at the end of the year but I find myself using the time to recover rather than for the intensive writing I always plan to do.

I have spent the last several days doing a lot of reading.  That too is a coping technique.  I’ve got some good books that I’m looking forward to finishing in 2026.  And the blog bibliography continues to grow.  Looking ahead I see reading and writing.  That to me is a vision of hope.  I didn’t stay up to midnight last night—that only makes me start out the new year grumpy.  No, instead I woke up early to start the year by writing.  And reading.  What does 2026 hold?  I have no idea.  I’d rather not speculate.  I do believe that as time stretches on some improvements will begin to take place.  I do believe holidays are important, both looking back and looking ahead.

Symbolic Light

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I’m a great believer in symbolism.  I have made a number of symbolic gestures in my life, whether anybody notices or not.  Today is the winter solstice, a day of great symbolic importance.  Not only do we light a Yule log at home, accompanied by poetry reading, but I have another, private symbolic act.  This year I will substitute our usual nightlight for the wicker tree.  Not the one from the movie, thank you.  No, many years ago, when my mother was still alive and working at a local department store, she bought us a small wicker and plastic Christmas tree.  When you plug it in, it shines with white Christmas lights.  Every year I set it on the landing at the turning point in our staircase to substitute for our usual night light.  We have an older house and the nightlight is important for going downstairs when it’s still dark.

The symbolism here is that my mother is bringing light on the shortest day of the year.  The solstice has been observed from time immemorial in northern climes.  We may not have a white Christmas this year but we’ve already had a pretty significant snowstorm (all melted by a significant rain and wind storm), but the solstice is about light, not cold.  You may not have noticed it, but the sun is setting just a bit later these days.  It’s also rising later, as it will continue to do until the second week of January.  The solstice is the day when the number of hours of light is the least, when the longer evenings are offset by the later mornings.  Earth-based religions, which gave us Yule, longed for days of greater light.  This was the symbolic reason for Christmas so near the solstice.

My symbolic switching of nightlights isn’t the only symbolism I realized this year.  As I was thinking about the significance of this day for making the change I realized that the nightlight we normally use dates back to the year my mother passed.  We had one emotionally-wrought morning to sort through her belongings.  One of the little things I picked up was a stained glass lamp.  It’s very small, with a candelabra size mount for the lightbulb.  It took the place of our old stair-top nightlight.  And although today I switch to the tree my mother gave us, the light that we normally have through the night comes from a small lamp I inherited from her.  All of us together await the returning of the light.

Speedy Delivery

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“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” is the unofficial motto of the United States Postal Service.  Like many such traditions, it has an origin story.  The saying was engraved on the James A. Farley Post Office Building in Manhattan.  The building, which is an impressive one from street level, is no longer a post office.  But the architect did not make up the inscription.  It is adapted from the Greek historian Herodotus.  Herodotus is known as both “the father of history” and “the father of lies.”  In other words, his histories aren’t always, strictly speaking, historical.  This is somehow appropriate given the saying’s pseudo-motto status.  Especially when you open up the USPS website and see headers such as in the image below.

So snow and rain will stay these couriers after all.  This is somewhat ironic, given that technology is supposed to make things so much easier.  And this is in no way a negative reflection on actual postal workers.  More than one of my family members has worked for the post office and I’ve even considered it myself.  It’s just the jarring of expectations that’s disturbing.  Around the holiday season, when the weather turns to its wintery mix, people grow anxious about their packages arriving on time.  Cryptic messages often await those who visit the USPS website, tracking number in hand.  A number that they supply to you cannot be found.  Or a parcel that was literally three miles away has been sent to a distribution center seventy miles away for delivery.  I pull old Herodotus from the shelf, looking for ancient wisdom.  It’s not even snowing here.

The Farley Post Office Building is no longer a post office.  Much of it has been converted into an extension of Penn Station, which is just across the street.  I sometimes used to walk from Penn Station to the Port Authority, which is only a matter of a few Midtown blocks away.  I had a glimpse of the new interior, briefly, darkly, from within an Amtrak train on its stop there on my way back from Boston.  I had no letters or packages with me at the time, which is probably a good thing.  You see, it was raining the last time I was there.  Now, I’m no Greek historian, but I did manage to drive home that night, although the rain delayed me by about an hour and a half.  No matter how noble our aspirations, the weather is still in charge.  And I figure I’d better learn to be less anxious about deliveries come the holidays, and read Herodotus instead.

No FOMO

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Some fringe websites (of course I do!) present the case for reincarnation via past lives memories, particularly of children.  You see, adults hear/read/see a lot of things as the years weigh down and we might misremember something we encountered somewhere else.  Children have less exposure and therefore make more credible witnesses.  I know perfectly rational adults who believe in past lives as well.  I must confess, however, that this is one of the scariest things I can imagine.  I’m glad to have lived, most of the time, and I’m not in a hurry to end it prematurely, but the thought of doing it all over again is terrifying.  Even if it’s a different and better life.  You see, I entered life with a lot of questions and I have to say, over six decades later, I’m still uncertain about many of the answers.

If reincarnation means starting from scratch all over again, that scares me.  I’ve spent much of my life building walls to protect myself from the things that hurt me.  I avoid overly risky activities.  I handle sharp objects with great care.  I spend quite a bit of time by myself.  I don’t like being hurt.  That may be one reason that I watch horror movies.  They help to desensitize that particular phobia.  Still, I have to think of all the hard lessons I’ve learned in this life and have to think about how I might improve upon it all with another go-round.  In religions of East and Southeast Asia, where belief in reincarnation is common, the idea is often that you want to break out at the end.  Nirvana.  The place were you don’t have to queue up again.  Even Plato thought reincarnation might explain a lot.  But the very thought makes me feel weary.

If you could be rebooted with the knowledge of your previous life intact, that’d be one thing.  The idea of one day finding myself in another mother’s arms, not knowing anything, learning each microsecond, well, it’s frightening.  My parents weren’t educated people.  They taught me the blue-collar hard knocks of life (which I don’t want to have to learn again).  The white-collar hard knocks are sometimes even worse.  I tried to live this life as a clergyman, but that never really panned out.  I sometimes wonder if the Abrahamic religions/monotheistic traditions, didn’t develop Heaven and Hell out of fear of reincarnation.  The idea certainly makes sense, in some contexts.  And it’s one of the scariest things I can imagine.

Reading Habits

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I keep track of my reading on both this blog and Goodreads.  It’s a little easier to follow the numbers on Goodreads, so I tend to use their stats.  One thing I’ve noticed in tracking my pacing this year is that academic books slow me down.  I desperately hope this isn’t endumbification, but I feel the need to consult the experts even as I try to write for a wider audience.  Having been trained as a professional researcher, it’s difficult to let go and just read the popular books—those with the style I need to learn to emulate.  But academic books take so long to get through.  Maybe it’s because they’re consciously designed not to be fast reading.  They take time and have concepts that require thought as your eyes consume the words.  They’re also the language I spoke for a good few decades.

My nonfiction reading pile constantly grows taller and I can’t seem to keep up.  Largely it’s because many of them are academic books.  I’m aware that in the real world, where books sell more than a couple hundred copies, that those who can’t claim “Ph.D.” after their names make the most successful writers.  A few of my colleagues have broken through to mainstream publishing, but they generally have university jobs, and tenure.  They don’t have a 9-2-5 schedule that holds their feet to the fire for the lion’s share of every day.  There are writers, I’m learning, who hold down jobs and write more successful books.  They generally aren’t academics, however.  Normal people with intense interests that they express beautifully in words.  Then they go to work.

I’m trying to break into that world.  I know that the publishers I’ve resorted to have been academic publishers.  They don’t really compete with the trade world, nor do they really even try.  Their’s is a business model adjusted for scale.  When you can’t sell in volume, you need to jack up the price.  But to have something intelligent to say about a subject, you have to read books.  I guess I need to learn to read non-academic non-fiction.  Kind of like I have to drink decaf when I have coffee (rarely) and have them add oat milk to make it a latte.  This is difficult for an old ex-academic like me.  I want to know how writers know what they do.  What are their sources and how deeply did they dig?  As I set my shovel aside I realize that I’ve begun to dig that academic hole yet again.

Naming Things

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There’s this thing that you saw and you don’t know what it was called.  It was, say, an architectural or engineering part of a bridge.  Specifically a railroad bridge.  You’ll find that even with dedicating quite a lot of time to it, the internet can’t tell you what is is called.  I was recollecting something that happened to me as a child that involved a railroad bridge.  I can picture the bridge quite clearly in my head, and I wanted to know what a specific feature was called.  Google soon taught me that there are far too many types of bridges to get the answer to my specific question.  No matter how many bridge pictures I examined, even specifically railroad bridges, I couldn’t come up with one sharing the feature I was remembering.

What I need is to sit down with a roomful of experts, make a drawing on the whiteboard, and see if one of them can answer the specific question: what’s this called?  The web is a great place for finding information, but the larger issue of finding the name of something you don’t know is even larger than the web.  Is that even possible?  Yes, for the human imagination it certainly is.  People tend to be visual learners.  (This is one reason that book reading is, unfortunately in decline.)  Videos online can convey information, and some even “footnote” by listing their sources in the description.  The problem in my case is, they’re not interactive.  To get a question answered, you need to ask a person.  I don’t trust AI as far as I can retch.  It has no experience of having been on a railroad bridge as a child when a train began to approach.

Technically, walking along railroad tracks is trespassing.  Mainly this is because it’s dangerous and potentially fatal.  (And somebody else owns the property.)  Growing up in a small town, however, one thing guys often do is walk along the tracks.  They are good places for private conversations with your friends.  The added air of danger adds a bit of zest to the undertaking.  Rouseville, one of my two childhood towns, was quite industrial.  That meant a lot of railroad tracks.  I had an experience on one of the bridges at one time and I really would like to know what the various parts are called.  Just try searching for illustrations of exploded railroad bridge parts.  If you do, you may find the answer to the question that I have.  But the only way I’ll know that for sure is if I can point to it and ask you, “what is this called?”

Do I Know You?

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How do you know someone without ever seeing them?  How do you know they are who they say they are?  I’ve been spending a lot of time on the phone, much of it trying to establish my identity with people who don’t know me.  This has happened so much that I’m beginning to wonder how many of the people I’m talking to are who they say they are.  I never was a very good dater.  Going out, you’re constantly assessing how much to reveal and how much to conceal.  And your date is doing the same.  We can never fully know another person.  I tend to be quite honest and most of the coeds in college said I was too intense.  I suppose that it’s a good thing my wife and I had only one date in our three-year relationship before deciding to get married.

Electronic life makes it very difficult to know other people for sure.  I don’t really trust the guardrails that have been put up.  Sometimes the entire web-world feels false.  But can we ever go back to the time before?  Printing out manuscripts and sending them by mail to a publisher, waiting weeks to hear that it was even received?  Planning trips with a map and dead reckoning?  Looking telephone numbers up in an unwieldy, cheaply printed book?  You could assess who it is you were talking to, not always accurately, of course, but if you saw the same person again you might well recognize them.  Anthropologists and sociologists tell us the ideal human community has about 150 members.  The problem is, when such communities come into contact with other communities, war is a likely outcome.  So we have to learn to trust those we can’t see.  That we’ll never see.  That will only be voices on a phone or words in an email or text.

I occasionally get people emailing me about my academic work.  Sometimes these turn out to be someone who’s hacked someone else’s account.  I wonder why they could possibly have any interest in emailing an obscure ex-academic unfluencer like me.  What’s their endgame?  Who are they?  There’s something to be said for the in-person gathering where you see the same faces week after week.  You get to know a bit about a person and what their motivations might be.  Ours is an uncertain cyber-world.  I have come to know genuine friends this way.  But I’ve also “met” plenty of people who’re not who they claim to be.  Knowing who they really are is merely a dream.

Eve of Winter

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“You must live like a monk!”  These were the words of one of my bosses.  I really couldn’t deny it.  I try to lead a quiet life of reading and writing and I do try to avoid extravagances.  My contemplative life suits me.  Every now and again, however, busy stretches come and distort my perspective.  Thinking back over this autumn on the eve of December, that season has been one of those times.  So much so that I haven’t been able to watch much horror, which is one of my usual seasonal avocations.  I suppose it started when a scammer emptied out our bank account in early September.  That entire month is a blur of fear, depression, and anxiety.  Those emotions have settled down, but the trauma and financial loss have remained.  

Toward the end of the month, my daughter moved.  Thankfully not too far away, but parents often feel the need to help when their only child is not yet well established in a new area.  October grew so busy that we had no time to decorate for Halloween.  We did manage to carve some pumpkins, but the weekends—the only time anything for real life actually gets done—were all eaten up and I entered November with that crowded head space that accompanies a monk lost in the secular world.  Looking back, I finished fewer books than usual and I’ve already mentioned about the movies.  This year I was pretty sure I’d be attending the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in November.  I had missed the past two years, not really mourning the loss, but preparing for the trip occupied part of October.  Halloween came and went, taking the first weekend of November with it.

In November we had guests come and the second weekend disappeared.  The next weekend I had to get into high gear for my trip to Boston.  That was when I had the flu shot that wiped out a weekend.  I awoke groggily on Monday realizing that Friday I’d be on Amtrak’s Northeast Regional.  I’d never been to Metropark before and the conference itself ate up the fourth weekend in November.  After that, we turned around and spent Thanksgiving with some longtime friends in New Jersey.  Then we learned a Pennsylvania friend had spent the holiday alone and decided to make a celebration for them yesterday.  So here I find myself on the eve of winter with a fall that somehow disappeared.  Busy spells can be refreshing, even for the monkish.  But tomorrow is back to work as usual as December sets in.

Boston’s Poe

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Among my parasocial relationships, the strangest are those with people long dead.  Poe is among them, and, I suspect, this is probably a common thing.  As I age and find it difficult to muster the energy to attend large meetings with lots of people, the one factor that excited me about this year’s AAR/SBL, apart from being in New England again, was meeting Poe.  Now, I know that “Poe Returning to Boston” isn’t actually Poe himself.  But I do believe that places retain something of the essence of what happens in them.  Poe was born in Boston, on Carver Street.  The building itself was demolished some time ago.  I set out to see the site yesterday morning before the conference began, only to find that it is now fenced off, having been acquired by MassDOT.  As I stood there, wondering, fearing, it occurred to me just how much of a role pilgrimages play in our lives.

I’ve written about my SBL experiences before on this blog—look at my November posts for many of the years I’ve been doing this—but Boston is by far the most personal.  Part of it is certainly the fact that I lived here for about three years, but Poe is definitely part of it too.  As I went to do an uncrowded photo essay of Stefanie Rocknak’s statue, although it was quite early on a Sunday morning, and also quite chilly, I wasn’t the only one there.  A couple came along to pose with Poe.  When I took my initial photo (on my Saturday morning post) I had to await a different couple consorting with Poe.  I know this isn’t Poe, but it has come to represent his presence is my favorite city.  The mingling of emotions was strong.  

The sign designating this as Edgar Allan Poe Square is faded and weather-beaten.  I can imagine that local politicians have headier issues with which to wrestle, beyond replacing an aging sign for aging tourists.  And having read J. W. Ocker’s Poe-Land, I know there’s a bust of Poe in the Public Library now.  I walk by it each morning and evening, but the conference schedule keeps me out.  Poe himself was no great fan of Boston but this is where the world first met him.  I know that I should get my head in the game of academic conferencing, but I’m a little distracted by the presence of a friend I never met.  And breathing the rarified air of New England.

Revisiting

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It’s funny returning to a city you once felt you knew well.  Cities are constantly evolving creatures and even though I got around Boston as a student and then as an employee of Ritz Camera, there were places I simply never found.  There was no internet in those days so we relied a lot on word of mouth.  If others weren’t talking about it, I’d never hear.  I first realized Boston had a Chinatown when attending my first AAR/SBL here.  That was in the day when you had to mail or fax hotel registrations in, if I recall, and I do remember staying up to midnight to try to get first choice after that.  Ironically, this year I again ended up in that neighborhood, south of the modestly-sized Chinatown.  I really didn’t mind, though, since the hotel isn’t too far from Edgar Allan Poe.

I first learned about “Poe Returning to Boston” from my daughter.  She saw it while visiting Boston with a friend.  I learned more about it by reading J. W. Ocker’s Poe-Land.  When I lived here, from 1985 through 1988, I knew of no public markers of Poe’s presence.  None of the more prominent ones were here then.  On a trip to Boston for Routledge I sought out the Poe birthplace plaque—the actual house had been torn down—and found it.  It’s still here as I saw last night.  But the place that was formerly marked only by a painted electrical box now has a statue.  Poe, preceded by his raven, walks across the area named for him with a suitcase in hand.  Behind him, pages from his manuscripts lie on the ground.

It’s long been known that Boston and Poe had an ambivalent relationship.  Poe was born here and lived here for a time, but never felt that the city accepted him.  He lived in New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore for some time, but mostly considered Richmond, Virginia home.  That’s where the Allans lived and where his mother is buried.  Poe himself famously and mysteriously died in Baltimore.  He had some measure of fame at the time but still lived in poverty.  The feeling seems to be that Poe would’ve liked to have liked Boston—it has been my favorite major US city ever since I first moved here four decades ago.  Now, of course, I only get back on occasion, mostly when AAR/SBL comes to town.  Although Poe wasn’t here the last time I was, I always find something new when I return.