. . . starts on Wednesday. At the desk, we are in the middle of final revisions on a novel coming out next year, a story based in part on a journey taken with our brother, mother, and grandmother in 1959. The replication of that long-ago trip, from Cleveland to Atlanta, will fix in place a handful of geographic and scenic details we feel impelled to get right, though the story itself is quite done. We have not been back to Cleveland since 1961, and are anxious about visiting the old homestead again. It still exists, apparently, though you might have thought it would go the way of the dirigible. A half century seems a fairly long time, but we’ll have a better understanding of that next week.

The route we took back then is only known because the original AAA Triptik from 1959 has been preserved. Mom saved everything, a blessing in this case. One interesting note: according to the Triptik, after leaving Cleveland we stayed at a place called El Siesta in Delaware, Ohio. This makes an appearance in the novel and, indeed, still exists. On the manuscript we’re now working on, our editor queried the improper El in the motel’s name. But there it is, in our travel documents and in real life. What more will we find? There is a Facebook fan page at which we’ll post updates from the road.

. . . was an unfamiliar term until Thursday evening when I was honored to speak to a group of them. For over thirty years, the School of Education at the University of Connecticut (known as the Neag School) has paired its student teachers with cooperating teachers — seasoned professionals in elementary, middle, and high schools in the towns around UConn, to create a continuum of learning and support that, as was plain on Thursday, benefits both the veterans and recruits in equal measure. It’s an outstanding program with a long history and, we hope, a longer future.

We talked about stories (of course), inspiration, Pico Della Mirandola, Kafka, and the combined responsibility of teachers and children’s writers to shed some light for our children in the dark world. Yes, the dark world. It’s not a very nice place out there right now, reminding us of all sorts of maudlin but nevertheless very possibly accurate Wordsworthian claims of the angelic primacy of childhood. But then you look into the faces, young and old, of that audience at Rose Commons, and you cannot help but see the bright side. So many college seniors on the verge of making this a better place. We can hope, after all.

The event was sponsored by the Neag School, their program Teachers for a New Era, which rings with hope and vitality, and Phi Lambda Theta, a fraternity with a special focus on education. Thank you, Neag, TNE, and all, for a lovely evening among the good.

When I was younger, though not so very much younger that I shouldn’t have known better, I found myself puzzling over the question: when are you exactly half your father’s age? Working it out longhand, through some trial and error, I discovered of course that it’s when you are the same age he was when you were born. It’s a fact of mathematical beauty that had escaped me until then, but here I rely on the Great Detective’s ignorance of our planetary system; or as my daughter once said in a skit: “My mind is very much taken over.”

This fact was brought back to me the other day when I was digging in my mother’s house and found a packet of letters, postcards, school drawings, mass cards, and assorted paper items on the floor in the back of a closet stuffed with clothes.

“What do you see?” Lord Carnarvon asks.
“Wonderful things!” Howard Carter responds.

Or something like that. In addition to a couple of dozen postcards and letters to my mother (and her children) from my grandmother at various stops on her many-visaed 1960 trip to Vienna and the Eastern Bloc to visit her family in Budapest, there were two letters from my father to my mother while he was at Georgetown and she was in Ohio with her sons trying to support all four of us. I was six at the time of the letters, my father thirty-six, or over twenty years younger than I am now.

I won’t divulge the contents of the letters, though they are commonplace. That (right, that) seems an invasion of some kind. But the tone of them was absolutely familiar from a far earlier part of my own life, and a bit sad. It’s a wonder anyone ever took me seriously when I was that way. Apparently more is granted to a father. They included a kind of apologetic yearning, both self-defacing and pleading, and a petulance that I suppose is entirely genetic. It will take some re-readings to absorb the letters, or, rather for them to slot themselves into the spectrum of emotions one carries away from childhood. I suppose the menacing edifice of Father does not expect bundles of letters from his youth to be ferreted out of dead peoples’ closets.

I was speaking to a friend the other day about this very thing. He told me he had dicovered a raft of letters from his father to his mother before they were married and agreed with his siblings to leave them unread. I can completely see that. These seemed more in the nature of reports from a distant city which, in small ways, they were. In the meantime, the ferreting and slotting goes on.