slowly returning to life …
after a whirlwind tour of Cincinnati in search of a house to rent. It was an overwhelmingly dense trip, during which we saw at least a dozen places (most of which were ridiculously wrong for us) over the course of two days, along with a number of wonderful social outings which helped us feel very welcome in these new environs — a dinner party with a few of our future colleagues at UC, breakfast with the English chair and his wife, and a poetry reading hosted by Dana Ward (of Cy Press and Publico fame), which allowed us to meet a great many local poets, including Norman Finkelstein, Tyrone Williams (both of whom we’ve recently posted on PennSound), Pat Clifford (one of the evening’s readers) and Michael Henson (another Jesuit refugee, who was kind enough to guide us home at the end of the night).
All of this breathless momentum and adrenaline — I should also mention that I must’ve driven at least 200 miles (probably more), going from showing to showing — came to a crashing halt when we had to wait about six hours at the airport before our flight home took off, making me feel as if I were writing my own version of Charles’ fantastic poem “Self Help”: “Endless wait in a dead-end airport terminal — why not finish that Ron Padgett book you just bought? // Cramped legs ache at 30,000 feet — how wonderful it is to feel!”
This wonderful evening ended when a gypsy cab picked us up in the middle of an airport service road, then zipped us home at approximately 85 m.p.h. through late traffic on the Schuylkill (he didn’t have a working speedometer) almost getting into several accidents, all before trying to scam both us and the hapless Drexel undergrad (who was already in the cab when we got in) into paying twice the airport rate (which doesn’t even apply in our neighborhood). So, I guess I should say, the evening didn’t really end until I almost got into a fistfight with the cabbie at the corner of 47th and Spruce at 1:00 in the morning — thankfully, the ubiquitous (and useless) University City yellowshirt who was on the corner took off as soon as we pulled up.
So, all of this is to say that I’ve spent most of the day in a daze, and, as the title above says, slowly returning to life. I figure I should have the cobwebs cleared out by tomorrow, so if you’re waiting on an e-mail from me, you should be getting it soon (I hope).
