Hiram

October 8, 2007

"Falsgraf Garden Room" of the Hiram College Library, Hiram, Ohio. I’m comfortable here. I thought it would be well to come here and write, so I can be sure to have written something in Hiram in two millennia. It turns out that one can reach Hiram simply by driving north on Eastwood into Portage County, and guessing your way after that, as I did this morning. It would have given me comfort in the old days to know my paradise was so available.

I wandered Hiram, and was glad for many things. The college is growing, vital, vibrant. I went into the bookstore, and signed my new book on the sly. I was glad that they had copies of all my books, the poetry, at least. I was triply glad that the bookstore manager recognized and knew me. I was gladder still when a professor from the time when I was a professor– Political Science, whom I didn’t remember and had no recollection of meeting– stopped under Hinsdale and called me by name. He realized I didn’t know him, told me his name, and then said, "I know you because you haven’t changed at all. I guess you decided not to age." True or not, it was the thing I needed to hear. I sat for a long while in the downstairs of the Kennedy Center. Carol Donley was in a meeting there, and of all people I wanted to see her most. But it looked like she was never going to get out of the meeting, and so at last I slunk away. It is cruel anyway to plop down unannounced into the middle of people’s lives.

I drove 82 to 91 to I could stop at Crown Hill and visit mother’s grave. The hurt child inside will never get over it, will sob like an orphan every time, but the rest of me owned something good. I possessed, for the first time I have ever stood there, the conviction that everything was going to be well. Aengus the Young had passed over those fields at my calling, and the earth was vibrant with him.

Hot autumn in Akron. Father has been driving me crazy. All is as it should be.