October’s Poetry

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October is a beautiful, melancholy time of year.  Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7.  Two years ago today, my mother died.  This was brought home to me forcefully yesterday.  A colleague had invited me to address her class at Princeton Theological Seminary about Weathering the Psalms.  I had vacation days that have to be used up or lost, so I took the day off.  My wife and I drove to Princeton, a town we know well.  When we lived in Somerville, about 15 miles north of there, we’d visit Princeton not infrequently.  I wasn’t really familiar with the seminary grounds, however.  My colleague informed me that her class, on the Princeton Farminary (where a program in ecology and theology is housed) would be meeting in a barn so I should dress appropriately for the weather.  A cold front had come through, so I went for the tweed and turtleneck combo.

So we set off on a beautiful drive along the Delaware.  The leaves aren’t at peak yet, but there was plenty of fall color as we navigated our way toward Frenchtown, where there is a bridge across the river.  The GPS also told us this was the way to go.  On River Road, still in Pennsylvania, a flagman refused to let us on the bridge, although the signs did not say it was closed.  He impassively waved us on.  The GPS insisted we “return to the route.”  We soon found out why.  The next crossing is seven miles further down, along winding roads with a 25 mph speed limit.  The drive was beautiful, but suddenly I was going to be late for my appointment.  The new route added 45 minutes to the estimated travel time.  After uttering some choice words about unplanned bridge closures on a road where there are only a very few ways to emulate Washington’s crossing, we eventually arrived.

The weather beautiful, if a little chilly, the class decided to meet outdoors.  I hadn’t forgotten how much I love teaching.  It was brought back to me with force.  With the trees reminding us that winter is not far off, and the students eagerly asking questions, I felt at home for the first time in many years.  It was a temporary shelter, I knew, but it was a kind of personal homecoming.  Carefully avoiding the Frenchtown bridge, we drove north, crossing to River Road at Milford.  If the GPS had known that to go forward you sometimes need to go backward, it would’ve sent us to Milford that morning.  We arrived home tired but glowing from a day out of the ordinary.  As I put my tweed away that evening I found a pencil from the the funeral home where I last saw my mother in the pocket.  It had been the last time I’d worn this jacket, two years before.  October is a beautiful, melancholy time of year. 

Disney Dark

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I write a fair bit about dark academia, but one of the strangest higher education events in my life was when the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature held their annual meeting in Orlando.  At Disney World.  Seeing the world’s top academics in the field against a backdrop of Snow White, or whatever, was surreal, expensive, and just a bit off.  I guess others felt that way too, because the conference never returned.  I have never had a desire to visit any Disney theme parks.  It is something that simply has no appeal to me.  As much as I appreciate fantasy in my reading and movie watching, in real life I prefer to visit places with home-grown authenticity.  At the same time, I realize many people adore Disney attractions.  (I just can’t get over why you’d want to visit a manufactured Main Street when there’s a real one not terribly far away.)

The Dark Side of Disney by Leonard Kinsey is one of those books that grew out of a blog.  Believe me, I’ve been tempted more than a time or two to pirate my own work here to try to make something that people would pay to buy.  In any case, Kinsey is a Disney fan.  Growing up poor, I was never accustomed to summer vacations.  One year we made a memorable trip to Washington, DC.  I didn’t realize it then, but that was where my grandmother, who lived with us, had been born.  I remember aspects of that trip and realize that it was my model of what a vacation was meant to be.  Kinsey grew up not far from Disney World and with a mother with a bit more free cash than mine.  This book is his exposé of the less-expected aspects of Disney.  Not only an exposé, but a “how to.”

I do understand the desire to be a “bad boy”—I suspect most of us do (chose your gender-appropriate nouns, of course).  The thing is, I’m not a rule-breaker.  Realizing that the guardrails in life are generally set up to help people, as much as I’m curious about what goes on behind the scenes, I prefer legal means of finding information.  I’m no fan of large corporations, but if they set the rules (you have to pay to get in, and once you’re here agree to uphold the illusion) then that’s the right thing to do.  In my opinion.  Then again, when you’re with a bunch of academics of religious studies there’s a limited amount of trouble to be had.  Unless you read about dark academia.

Name Your State

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My grandfather’s name was Homer.  I’ve often wondered about that since he was from a long line of uneducated farmers.  Since he was born in Bath, New York, and since I’ve poked around upstate for genealogical purposes, I noticed that there were several place names derived from the classics, including Homer.  I suspect that’s where his name came from.  His ancestors had biblical names.  This got me to wondering about the many upstate classics town names of Utica, Syracuse, Ithaca, Corfu, Palmyra, and more.  A little (very little) research led me to Robert Harpur.  Harpur was a one-time clerk in the New York State Surveyor General’s office, and he assigned names to several towns, using classical sources.  I haven’t found a comprehensive list, but all of this makes me homesick for upstate, a place I’ve never lived.

My Homer

My mother’s paternal line had deep roots in New York state.  Nobody in the family went to college, although my grandfather did take a couple of courses at Cornell to qualify as a country teacher.  Then, many years later, my daughter moved to Ithaca.  We spent many fine weekends there and would’ve moved there had we been able to afford it.  It was a kind of homecoming.  But the connections have a way of wending their way around, as they often do.  Robert Harpur settled in Binghamton, New York.  Harpur College, now Binghamton University, State University of New York, was named after him.  Not aware of any of this, my daughter attended Binghamton University.  (There was even a picture of me on their website for a while, a photo snapped by someone as I sat in the financial aid office one parents’ weekend, begging for more money.)  I have no way of proving this, but it seems that Harpur’s interest in the classics may have led to my grandfather’s unusual Christian name.

Here’s where it gets interesting.  Homer had a sister named Helen.  Of Troy?  (There’s also a Troy, New York.)  Perhaps a family name?  My records don’t really answer that for me.  And they had a brother named Ira.  Ira is a biblical name, but it also may be a variant of the name Hera, the wife of Zeus.  This had nothing to do with my writing my dissertation on Asherah, who is perhaps the namesake of Hera, or at least it has been proposed.  I doubt my ancestors would’ve named a son after a Greek goddess (the family was of Teutonic origins).  Or maybe great-grandpa Adam was more educated than he let on and had read the Iliad?  If only I could afford to get back to Ithaca I might just go on an odyssey of my own.

Hello September

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Labor Day is as early as it can possibly be this year and as late as it can possibly be next year.  We live in a time of extremes. In any case, it’s our hello to September and our goodbye to summer.  Since I still think of weather quite a bit, I’m reflecting on how most of the month of August around here has felt like autumn.  A month that I normally think of as consisting of hot dog days as summer reinforces its grip has been one of chilly mornings requiring long-sleeved jogging togs, and even fingerless gloves indoors for a morning or two.  July was hot and rainy.  The kind of hot that saps your strength and energy.  August felt like relief after that, but now we greet September, wondering what might lie ahead.  Many of the trees around here have already started to change, which looked a little odd when it was only August.

A couple weeks ago

Autumn has always been my favorite season, as it is for many people.  It is poignant, however.  Summer has its endless lawn mowing, but trades that off with not requiring a jacket to be outdoors and plenty of sunshine.  More than that, even traditional capitalistic businesses tend to slow down a bit in the summer, if for no other reason, because many employees take vacation time and everything has to put on the brakes a little.  Because we work at breakneck pace for the remainder of the year, this more relaxed season is a welcome respite.  We know, as nights grow cooler and longer, that it is time to put that away for another year.  It’s a season of transitions which is what makes it so melancholy.  Work starts to feel more serious after Labor Day, but the holidays are at least within grasp.  Halloween is really the next on the list.

I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever be able to retire, and if I do, if these day off holidays will be so important to me.  I’ve been interested in studying holidays pretty much all of my professional life.  Never really a fan of the capitalistic ethos, after being thrown into that world I quickly learned to look at holidays as stepping stones to get me through the year.  The first four months are rough.  They do have holidays sprinkled here and there, but March and April and most of May are holiday free zones.  That’s one reason the more relaxed fit summer is welcome.  The pace picks up again tomorrow, but for today, at least, we have one last ounce of summer to live.

Long Tail

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There’s a truism in academic publishing (how many of these are actually falsisms!) that a book reaches its sales potential in three years.  After that, the received wisdom says, a sale here or there may occur, but the book has reached the end of its commercial life.  One of the problems with this is that sometimes a topic will experience a resurgence, or, perhaps, pick up for the first time.  Some publishers raise their back list prices every year, making those late sales nearly impossible.  McFarland, however, seems to understand that if you lower prices after the front list sales, a book may live on.  I received a royalty statement for Holy Horror this week.  I’m used to sales being low but I was surprised to see that the lifetime total is now up to 246 copies. Still no bestseller, but more than it was six months ago.  Many of those sales have been in the past year, six years after publication.  I was chuffed.

Academic publishers who price books at around $100 and keep them at that level are killing those books.  Nightmares with the Bible is so priced (and the publisher has no taste for paperbacks), meaning that it has sold less than 100 copies.  Surprised?  I’m not.  Academic pricing models are terribly outdated but the extra revenue from hardcovers priced beyond the reach of the interested reader is just too enticing to leave behind.  Libraries are the main market, in their mind.  Libraries, however, are in the crosshairs.  The Make America Dumb Again crowd is even slashing our copyright library—the Library of Congress—where a copy of each book published in America is kept.  Who else will be left to buy expensive books?

Speaking of libraries, I have an embarrassing confession to make.  I’ve seen (but not been in) the largest library in the United Kingdom, the Bodleian.  The Bodleian is the main library of Oxford University.  I’ve been to Oxford a few times but I don’t know the city well.  The embarrassing confession is that I realized I’d seen the Bodleian only by reading a novel that stated Blackwells, the bookstore, is just across the street.  I know right where Blackwells is, of course, and have been there a time or two.  There’s a kind of irony in that I learned a truth about the world by reading a novel about a place I’d been.  I spend more time in bookstores than libraries these days, but since I make purchases I like to think I’m supporting the growth of knowledge, in my own small way.  And I write books, which, pleasingly, still sell a few copies in a year even when they’re old.

Dead, Not Sleeping

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A Nightmare in New Hope is a fairly intimate space.  The owner told us that the collection will change and grow, given that he’s still collecting.  Having a particular interest in Tim Burton’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow—having a book (ahem) on the subject coming out soon (cough)—I was particularly anxious to see what props they had.  To make sense of this it helps to have seen the movie, but you’ll catch on, even if you only know the Disney version of the story.  There were three main items from the movie that they have on display.  One is the wax seal used for the Van Garrett will, used as the movie opens.  The seal is quite large.  Of course, movies substitute props from time to time, blended by celluloid magic.  CGI doesn’t leave as many tracks.

The second artifact is one that wouldn’t have occurred to me to have even existed.  This was the animatronic horse’s head for Daredevil, the Headless Horseman’s mount.  There are a couple scenes in the film involving horse acting, and I’d just assumed that trained animals were used.  Being up close and personal with this artificial head, a couple thoughts came to mind.  One is that right next to it, it’s quite obvious that it’s artificial.  The second thought was just how much thought and effort goes into a big-budget movie.  For a few seconds of a close-up horse head, this model had to be constructed and used and then set aside.  I asked the owner about how such things were acquired, and he noted that production companies don’t keep everything.  He also noted that movie artifact prices have skyrocketed.  Both because horror is now popular and because CGI, as noted, doesn’t leave tracks.

The third, and most proudly displayed Sleepy Hollow piece is the Headless Horseman’s sword.  This appears in the movie far more often than either Daredevil’s head or the wax seal.  One of the aspects of Washington Irving’s story I discuss in Sleepy Hollow as American Myth is that the Horseman’s weaponry changes over time.  I won’t say more since, like museum owners, those who write books hope that they well sell a few copies.  I’ll be revisiting A Nightmare in New Hope from time to time.  For the items on display, I’d seen probably 90 percent of the movies, and a few of them I’d discussed in some detail in either Holy Horror or Nightmares with the Bible.  Of course, the Sleepy Hollow book is forthcoming (ahem).

Scary Father’s Day

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Given my circumstances, I never really celebrated Father’s Day growing up.  By the time I was old enough to get the concept, my father was long gone.  My step-father, some years later, was no real father.  Besides, we were poor and it was hard to think what such a celebration might entail.  All of which is to say that I never really expect much from the day myself.  My wife and daughter suggested we try Nightmare in New Hope again—this is the horror movie museum in New Hope, Pennsylvania, which had been closed last time we tried.  It was an appropriately rainy day, the kind we seem to specialize in around here.  I suspect that the museum will show up in a future blog post or two, but suffice it to say that it’s an impressive little collection.  It’s an odd feeling, this human desire to be in the presence of something you’ve seen in a movie.  I recommend it for any horror fans who happen to be along the mid-Delaware.

Not being large enough to take all day, we considered what we might do that afternoon.  In keeping with the theme, a visit to Vampa: Vampire and Paranormal Museum was suggested.  This museum is in Doylestown, which is only about a quarter hour from New Hope.  There’s more to it than just the museum, so it too will likely come up in future posts.  This museum contains a truly impressive array of artisanal vampire hunting equipment from Europe, dating between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.  I’ll try to put together a photo essay of it soon.  But that’s just the first room.  A second deals with demonic possession.  Then rooms have displays of occult and other esoteric artifacts, along with creepy suggestions to be careful of engaging too much with them.  The final room is dedicated to St. Michael the Archangel, and it warns that the struggle with evil is real.

Both places had a steady stream of visitors yesterday.  It would be fair to say that by the time we finished I was over-stimulated.  You have to understand that I personally don’t know many people interested in horror.  Going to these places was the sacrifice of a rainy Sunday afternoon for my family but will likely become one of those pleasant, lingering memories of the unusual that take on a rosy afterglow over the years.  This blog quite often ponders over why such things take on meaning for someone interested in religion and belief.  Being in the presence of artifacts, as noted above, puts you in touch with a kind of earnestness that mere electronic reading on the internet lacks.  If you happen to be along the mid-Delaware, the side trip to Doylestown is a worthy add-on, Father’s Day or not.

Framing

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Have you ever gone into one of those art museums where the frame of a painting is so lavish that you notice it almost more than the art it contains?  It certainly says something about me (or where I shop), that I prefer simple frames.  Those that ideally pick up and emphasize something in the picture.  I recently critiqued a book on this blog because the framing seemed off.  Not a week afterwards I found myself going down an internet rabbit hole (the topic isn’t important) because someone had framed a speech so that it seemed to be reading things one particular way.  With that framing, I watched the speech and was astonished.  Then I sent it to one of my brothers and he pointed out that it could be understood a different way.  At first I was embarrassed and defensive (to myself), but I went back and listened again and realized he was right.  I’d accepted the framing uncritically.

We are incapable of seeing everything.  From the shape of our eyes to the limits on our distance vision, we can only take in so much.  That’s what frames are for.  We put them around paintings, photographs, posters, windows, and mirrors.  The demarcate the limit of something.  This image goes only so far.  Televisions used to do that, although now they seem to take up a wall instead of a framed corner space.  But even so.  Movie screens too.  They provide important context.  We know, looking at that screen, that something limited to that screen will appear.  We know that what’s caught in the picture frame can’t reach beyond it, physically.  (I am excluding some modern art, of course.)  Framing is important.

I am glad for this recent object lesson.  I was letting myself get worked up over something I may have viewed the wrong way because I had been primed to do so.  It involved one of my deepest wishes, so emotion definitely played a part in it.  Critical thinking involves looking at the frame and thinking about it as well as what’s inside.  Those who excel at creating content make you forget the frame is there.  The artist isn’t painting to fill a frame, the frame contains the art.  We all know this on some level, I suspect.  Nevertheless, when someone presents us anything with the interpretation built in, we need to ask ourselves if that interpretation is inherent in the object or is it simply part of the frame.  And if it’s the frame, no matter how fancy, we need to remove it and look from a different angle.

Museum Life

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Allentown is the third largest city in Pennsylvania after Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.  Here in the Lehigh Valley it abuts Bethlehem and is just a few miles from Easton.  Getting an early jump on Memorial Day this year my family visited the Allentown Art Museum.  My daughter had been there before and let us know that it’s not huge, but certainly worth seeing.  They do have a Rembrandt among their collection, and a few Medieval pieces, including a tapestry that I could swear I saw on a book cover once.  In any case, I would recommend it.  We’re still fighting with rain around here, so it was a great Friday diversion.  We’re museum people, and I’ve pursued creative outlets my entire life.  I like to look at those good enough to be on public display.  As I told my family, when I was young I was curious about art and checked out books from the library on the great masters so that I could learn to identify paintings I hoped some day to see.  And as a bonus, the Allentown Art Museum is free.

One of the features of the facility is a personal library designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.  The books on display aren’t his actual books (I don’t think), but being a book person I had to look over the titles.  Washington Irving was well represented.  Since Sleepy Hollow as American Myth will be out shortly, I was curious to see if they had The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.  This is the book in which “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” first appeared.  It seems they have all of Irving’s books because I did indeed find the Sketchbook.  Such an unexpected connection was a bonus on what was already an enjoyable visit.  I wandered out into the paintings again and found Tompkins Harrison Matteson’s “The Return of Rip Van Winkle.”  As I discuss in the book, “Rip Van Winkle” is also in the Sketchbook.  Not for the first time, I’d made a personal connection with art.

Visiting art museums always leaves me in a liminal space.  For a while my soul was mingling with those of others driven by creativity.  I’ve made a few art works myself over the years but I’ve really had no training.  I did take a drawing and painting class in college, but I kept none of my output.  I enjoyed making it, however.  My daughter asked why I don’t do more and the issue always comes down to time.  Work takes the lion’s share and now weed control (they love the rain) takes most of the rest.  And writing, of course.  That’s why I need to go to museums.  To become fully human again.

New Hope Nightmare

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One of my favorite places along the Delaware River is the town of New Hope.  Across the river is the very nice town of Lambertville, New Jersey, but New Hope has a feel to it.  When I learned that a new horror museum had opened there—Nightmare in New Hope—we scrambled to change plans to get there right away.  We went the Saturday before Easter.  We’d planned to spend some time touring the rest of the town as well since it’d been years since we’d done so.  We managed to find parking and, since the museum opens at one, grabbed some lunch and went to Farley’s Bookshop.  Independent Bookstore Day was actually the following weekend, but bookstores need no special occasion.  Farley’s has changed a lot since our last visit.  It’s smaller (as has happened with many indies) and brighter.  I found plenty to like there, but I did miss the darker, dustier feel to the first incarnation of the store I’d known.

We made our way to Nightmare in New Hope.  And waited.  And waited.  Several people passed by, noting that they’d have gone in if it were open.  One of our party messaged the website since telephoning did nothing.  Eventually the owner indicated that he was closed for Easter.  Of all things.  A horror museum, open only on weekends, closed for the first nice weather we’d had on a weekend?  That was the main reason we’d driven an hour to get there.  We found a place with vegan ice cream and fed the ducks on the river.  I was sad that the main objective of the trip, the museum, hadn’t turned out.  And I knew it would be quite some time before we could try again.

My daughter, knowing my tendency to get depressed over such things, suggested we could go to Peddler’s Village instead.  My wife and daughter had visited it before, and so we decided to round out our Saturday trip there.  Peddler’s Village is a set of speciality shops that was born about the same time that I was.  These days there are about 60 shops with items that may or may not be strictly necessary.  Although we’d been to Farley’s, I couldn’t pass up the Lahaska Bookshop, part of the Village.  It was warm that day and we saw maybe only five or six shops.  At least one of them was an independent bookstore.  Not exactly the day we’d planned, but a day spent in and around New Hope is never wasted.  But really, closed for Easter without even putting a notice on the website?

(See updates here and here.)

Space Rocks

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The thing from another world.  No, not the movie, but an artifact.  My recent post about the asteroid sent me looking for something.  When we lived in Wisconsin, we purchased a small piece of a meteorite while on a visit to the Yerkes Observatory.  It is, quite literally, a thing from another world.  The problem is, I can’t find it.  Our house isn’t that big but the fragment is quite small.  I’ve been told our house is like a museum—there are curios pretty much everywhere, and they each have some significance.  But the meteorite: where could it be?  I find that moving is one of the most disruptive activities known to those of us in the “developed” world.  As much as I wanted an organized move, the fact is that you can’t have such a move without taking at least a month off work in advance.

There are things (from this world) that I haven’t found in the six-plus years in this house.  Most often they’re like the meteorite in that I don’t think of them often, and when I do I wonder where I might’ve packed them.  Knowing where they might’ve been packed gives a clue to where they might’ve been unpacked.  And no matter what, some things get lost on every move.  There’s a book I had in New Jersey that is simply not here in Pennsylvania.  I’m sure I packed all our books.  One, at least, did not make it over the Delaware.   The fragment of meteorite, which is unique, is only about the size of a small ladybug.  Where might I have put it?  

That small fragment of rock traveled through the solar system.  It likely came from distances no human has ever gone.  Unimaginable distances.  Only to get lost in a house in Pennsylvania.  If it’s here at all.  Back when it was legal to pick up petrified wood, a family friend gave us two chunks from the petrified forest (for now, a National Park in Arizona).  One of them came to me and I treasured it for years.  I haven’t seen it since we moved to Pennsylvania.  There are boxes that haven’t been fully unpacked.  The squirrels make a mess of the garage every winter and I can’t go in there without feeling I should clean things up first, before emptying out the remaining boxes.  To a squirrel the thing from another world is just one more thing to ignore.  It has no value except for to an aging guy who remembers buying it at the very spot where Edwin Hubble worked and Albert Einstein visited.  Only to mislay it when moving fifty miles from state to state.

Not my meteorite. Image credit: Meteoritekid under the GNU Free Documentation License, via Wikimedia Commons

Dangerous Driving

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It reminded me of the time my manager fell down into the basement.  It also makes me think I must be neurodivergent.  Yesterday we were helping my brother in New Jersey get some things in order in his house.  He lives about an hour and a half from us and when the GPS showed us our options to get home we decided to go shunpiking.  I find something atmospheric, and maybe a little haunted, about driving along roads next to a river.  We crossed into Pennsylvania just north of Trenton and followed “River Road” home.  This stretch of road, mostly highway 32, is almost impossibly quaint.  I’d driven sections of it before, but not the whole stretch.  It was a pleasant day but we’d just come off of a period of rain and high winds.  The winds were still up, and have been gusting for about a week now.

After somewhere over an hour on this pleasant drive, we saw a motorcycle stopped in the road.  I slowed way down, unsure of what I was seeing (this starts the neurodivergent part), and I saw a man staggering across the road to lay down on the berm.  I could see branches on the road.  Unsure what to do, I pulled up next to him and offered to call 911 (my wife actually suggested that, since I didn’t know what to do. She’s better in a crisis than me.).  By then the people in the cars behind us had gotten out and one of them indicated they had medical training and that help was on the way.  The man indicated he’d been driving his motorcycle and the branch came down on him, or right in front of him—he was pretty dazed and confused.  Not wanting to throw my own ignorance and ineptitude into the mix, I pulled over, and my wife and I got out of the car and started clearing branches from the road.  Kay and I, and by now others, had pretty much cleared the road and, unsure what to do, and since there were many people attending the man, I drove off.

Image credit: Doug Kerr, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license, some rights reserved, via Flickr

That incident made me very reflective.  When I worked at Ritz Camera in Brookline, Massachusetts, one day my manager didn’t see that the cellar door (inside the store) was open.  We heard a scream and a thud and I ran to the door and pulled it back open.  The door had to be held by a hook and eyelet being joined and while I was trying to do that, one of my coworkers brushed past and down the stairs to help our manager.  Later, my co-worker ribbed me for being more concerned about the door than the person.  I was actually trying to help our manager, but in my mind, going down the stairs only to have the door fall on my head made no sense.  It turned out the manager was fine; a trip to the ER showed nothing seriously wrong with her.  I don’t know about that man by the side of the road.  I was only glad that, as my wife noted, so many people had stopped to help.  I just hope he, like my manager, was okay.

Upstate

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Unrequited love is sometimes tragic.  Other times it’s merely sad.  People are attracted to places.  Or at least the idea of places.  I was born in Pennsylvania, but to a wandering family.  I keep looking for roots—my tribe.  I didn’t know my father well growing up, but my mother’s family, before taking on that rootless search for greener pastures, was from upstate New York.  For several generations.  I’ve tried many times to land a teaching post somewhere upstate, but in vain.  Even when I knew the people in the department and had been to campus, like that time at Syracuse University.  It was raining when I visited, back in my Routledge days.  I was taken by what I experienced there, never to be welcomed myself.  My family was from a bit further north, around Albany, the head of the Hudson Valley.

At the time I wasn’t aware that my childhood hero Rod Serling was born in Syracuse.  My daughter was at school in Binghamton, which is where Serling grew up.  That I knew.  Nor did I know that Dan Curtis, creator of Dark Shadows—that other childhood staple—had gone to college at Syracuse.  Something about upstate.  I’ve remarked to my family that when traveling in this part of the country I catch glimpses of familial facial features in some strangers.  A passing glance suggests that they might be distantly related.  My unknown tribe.  Economics, however, have always kept me away.  Even when I explained in my cover letters that I felt that special connection my applications were summarily brushed aside.  Probably by folk who knew who their tribe was.  Probably from somewhere else.

In this world of internet loneliness, we long for connection.  We lived in Wisconsin for over a decade.  The only people I really got to know were those I knew from Nashotah House.  And this was even with years of involvement with the PTO, serving on the building committee, and even being president one year.  People were busy even back then.  I was thinking perhaps I’d found my tribe in Wisconsin. But then…  The move to New Jersey put me close to my ancestral state, but not in it (my mother was born in Jersey).  Economics, that dismal science, dictated that a move had to be back to Pennsylvania, where I was born among strangers.  Our nation is one of many tribes, including those we sought to exterminate to steal their land.  We have plenty of space, but we value economics over belonging.  You may buy the presidency, but you can’t buy your tribe.

Festival Spirit

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Festivals.  These common events, often outdoors, are ways to be around other people while not really seriously engaging them.  I spend a lot of time by myself, or alone with family.  We don’t know many folks locally (I’m pretty sure very few locals read this blog), so online community is often how I connect.  Still, even we introverts crave the human touch now and again.  In October we attended the Covered Bridge and Arts Festival in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania.  It is one of the largest free festivals on the east coast, and just a couple of hours from us.  While there, we learned about the much smaller Riverfest in nearby Berwick, held the same weekend.  We decided to stop there on our way home.  The thing about craft fairs is that you get used to seeing pretty much the same kinds of things over and over.  That’s fine, because we’re here for the atmosphere.

At one of these events, while my wife and daughter were examining the wares, an owner came up to me (I was just outside the tent) and said, with a bit of surprise and wonder in his voice, “You have the spirit of God.  You can tell someone who does.”  Now, this can be a sales ploy, of course, but he seemed sincere.  He really didn’t nail my spirituality, but he was correct that I am a very spiritual person.  Given his talk of Jesus, I suspect he’d have been put aback if I told him that horror films are one form of spiritual practice for me.  So I remained relatively noncommittal until he turned to my wife to tell her about the products in his tent.  Still, the encounter left me reflective.  I don’t think myself any kind of spiritual guru, but I have been singled out by a number of people over the years and I wonder what it is that they see.

Some New Agers suggest we all have auras.  That’s generally considered paranormal, of course.  I’ve known people, however, who’ve been accurately “read” by strangers who seem sensitive to such things.  Or are extremely good at cold reading.  When I go to a festival I don’t mean to have my aura showing.  I spend a lot of time alone, so maybe I’m hiding my aura in my house.  No neighbors have complained about the light pollution, in any case.  I admire those who see something special in strangers, even if it’s an attempt to get them to buy something.  That’s why we go to festivals, I guess: to have a kind of spiritual experience that comes from being with others.

Locating Yourself

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How do you come to where you spend your life?  It could be where you’re born.  I was born in Franklin, Pennsylvania.  Neither of my parents were.  On my mother’s side we had a tradition of wandering.  We eventually moved to Rouseville, a refinery town not too many miles from where I grew up initially, but very different in character.  I knew I wanted to get away.  I lived in Grove City next, only as a student.  For a short while I resided with some friends in the South Hills of Pittsburgh before moving to Boston to attend seminary.  Like many who go to Boston for school, I wanted to settle there.  I did so for about a year after graduation, making a living, such as it was, selling cameras.  My next move was precipitated by love.  I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan to be with my fiancée, but I’d already been accepted to Edinburgh University, so an international move was imminent.

Roseville

Edinburgh, like Boston, is a spiderweb.  We would’ve stayed if we legally could have, but with a job market for academics already tanking, we headed back over the Atlantic.  My wife was a grad student at the University of Illinois, so we moved first to Tuscola (family there), then Savoy (on the outskirts of Champagne-Urbana).  Meanwhile I commuted to Delafield, Wisconsin, home of Nashotah House.  We eventually moved to Delafield and stayed until I was no longer wanted.  Our move to Oconomowoc was necessary to keep our daughter in the same school.  The possibility of full-time employment drew me to Somerville, New Jersey.  We would stay there until my daughter had a chance to graduate.  Depression convinced me that I’d run out the clock in that apartment, but a financial advisor suggested Pennsylvania, where I was born.  Thus we ended up in the Lehigh Valley.

I’ve liked every place I’ve lived.  If I had my druthers, however, I would’ve ended up teaching at a small college in Maine.  Several friends have moved to Maine as I’ve jealously watched.  The places we spend our lives, at least in my case, are determined by a measure of fate.  Nashotah House was the only job I was offered from Edinburgh.  Gorgias Press was the only job I was offered after the seminary.  Moving to my home state was volitional, of course.  As a couple we’d have been content in Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin, or New Jersey.  Economics, of course, has a heavy hand in all of this.  I sometimes think that, if I could ever retire, moving to Franklin again would be a way of coming full circle.  But then, life is change and we end up, it seems, where we’re meant to be.  Perhaps Canada?