I approached Cleveland via a boxed-in interstate that gave way to a tumble of squat, banged-up factory buildings. All of a sudden, at a stoplight, a mylar-shiny baseball stadium ballooned into view on the left. An afternoon game would soon be getting underway. A beefy crowd clotted at the crosswalk, then streamed across, more likely to aggravate a melanoma than see the Indians win. After driving just fifteen more blocks, I could see the Lake and, jesus, another stupendous stadium. Cleveland – city of light, city of magic.

The Hyatt Regency hotel had been retrofitted out of a grand nineteenth century structure called The Arcade. In its original configuration, the five-story atrium was surrounded by lower floors of retail and, on the upper ones, offices. Now it was all hotel. The atrium ran the length of a city block beneath a glass canopy, so that the space flooded with soft, saturated light. Cast-metal gargoyles circled the fourth floor, leaning balefully into the vastness every twenty or thirty feet, each with a small incandescent bulb in its mouth. It’s a breathtaking interior. I was to meet my friend, Chet, there. He had driven up from Dayton to join me at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

A couple of phone calls and a knock on the door and there he was, lanky and gnomic, wearing jeans and a blue Indian-style shirt. Chet had flyaway white hair and a white beard that he tucked into the buttoned collar of his shirt for some odd reason. His features were large and well-formed; the ears had been pinned back many years ago, so it was up to his noble nose to give focus to the entire facial menagerie. He carried himself with the quiet aplomb of the professional actor. Chet was fond of me and I him. I offered him a seat and we proceeded to catch up – his search for community among the far-flung and long-lost, my writing process, the comings-and-goings of our children.

We adjourned for a dinner reservation nearby. A quick stroll along the ground floor canyon of The Arcade, out the back door, and soon we were seated in the noisy frat-bar front room of a highly regarded tavern. Though the decibels rose and fell insistently, we gabbed with enthusiasm. Chet recounted his curious method of decision-making, which involved a rubber cork on a length of chain that, held aloft, waggled one way for ‘yes’ and the opposite for ‘no.’ His technique had a friendly name I immediately forgot.

It developed that Chet had decided to forego the Federal Reserve Bank of Rock ’n Roll in favor of visiting an old friend from his days in the copy department of a greeting card company. His little rubber stopper jobber had advised him to alter his plans. I felt a twinge of abandonment, but quickly adjusted to the new normal. We agreed to meet for breakfast in the hotel and then proceed on with what the cosmos had in store.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has affixed itself to the shore of Lake Erie, a striking prism of glass, a bell jar of nostalgia and hype. A banner blazed across the marquee announcing THE ROLLING STONES, prematurely it turned out. First thing, the ticket guy proposed I take advantage of a photo opportunity by posing against a blue screen holding a red electric guitar with rockstar intention. At the end of the visit, 4×6 prints would be available for purchase. Oh, no thank you: not this time. I have posed as Elliot on his bike with ET in the front basket and nothing could ever possibly come close to the stupid magnificence of that.

Holy Shit! The Hall of Fame of Rock and Roll was a ridiculous, entertaining, exhausting place, crammed to the gills with minutiae, a lot like Ash U, but without the Republicans. In addition to a tsunami of ephemera, small print to squint at and presumably read, there was treasure – you could find pieces of the plane that took Otis Redding down, an ‘Otis’ fragment and a ‘Redding’ one; Jimi Hendrix’s sofa, an uncomfortable-looking section of a sectional; Michael Jackson’s glove revolving on a plexiglass pedestal, pinned by a spotlight, resplendent and dead as a butterfly; and CBGB’s awning that I used to see from my New York window until a couple years ago. The Hall of Fame sometimes had the feel of uniquely glamorous, museum-quality episode of Hoarders. The exhibit space in the basement was pitch dark, with labyrinthine, chronology-averse catwalks and cul-de-sacs that whipsaw you from Metal to Doo-Wop to Disco in an eyeblink. The whole thing was claustrophobic, over-reaching, and spectacular, like Aretha Franklin being squeezed into one of Diana Ross’ gowns.

On a higher floor, I stood in the back of a darkened theater and watched a compilation film of the famous inductees, beginning at the museum’s inception in 1986 with this bunch: Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and Elvis. It played the soundtrack to my life. When it came The Band’s turn, they included a snippet of Levon Helm singing The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. It lasted only a fraction of a second. Those seven words rang, my chest tightened, and my throat caught. I love this music. This place will always be just an attic full of stuff: fun, but really kind of beside the point.

More hill-and-dale driving, this time in search of authentic Amish baskets. Becca knew of a gentleman who set out his excellent wares in the parking lot of Shisler’s Cheese House on weekends. We stopped by, got his address, and then lit out on a GPS adventure. A half hour later, we beheld a hand-painted sign – baskets – in red lettering on a white section of corrugated metal nailed to a post. Abruptly, we turned left. I was in the back seat as we bucked down a dirt road. Out the side, I saw a pair of curious sheep pacing us from behind a fence. We stopped short of the house and chickens ran across our bow. No signs of human life.

I strode onto the porch and announced, “Hello?” through the screen door. The interior of the farmhouse lay deep in shadow. No response. I turned back to my friends with a shrug. The screen door creaked.

“You woke me from my nap.”

“Oh, hello there. Your nap?”

“After the noon meal. My nap.”

“We got your name from Shisler’s,” Becca said. “We’d like to see your baskets.”

“Baskets, yes. In the shed.”

He stepped off the porch and we followed quietly across the hardpack yard and through a dutch door. Spilling off a workbench and piled underneath, every conceivable form of woven container – breadbaskets, wastepaper baskets, pie carriers with leather handles (one-, two-, and three-pie), baskets that fit baking dishes of all sizes, and hampers with and without lids. The sharp smell of linseed oil cut through the dusty gloom. The basket man grew increasingly animated as he displayed his handiwork, which was very handsome and not without some quirky flaws. Before we knew it, he had disassembled the great pile basket by basket and I had selected four different ones for Christmas purposes. Well, three. The two-pie basket was for me.

The joy of beautiful, simple things, an encounter outside the bounds of my customary experience, made for a chesty exhilaration, a core happiness shared with friends. Back at the Amstutz farmhouse, I stowed my finds in the trunk of the car and bid Becca and Michael good-bye. The music of Cleveland beckoned.

The conference did not provide breakfast on departure day, so I tracked down some to-go coffee, gassed up the vehicle, consulted the next page of directions, and then pointed the car’s nose toward Kidron, Ohio. My friend, Becca and her husband, Michael, had offered to show me around the Amish counties of eastern Ohio. She had grown up there, for all intents and purposes, on the family farm. Ohio is home to more Amish and Mennonite families than Pennsylvania. The centerpiece of the tour would be lunch with her grandma, Ruth Amstutz, who lives in the farmhouse built after the family emigrated from Switzerland in 1840.

I pulled into the yard on the dot of ten o’clock. It was a damp, soft-focus morning, somewhere between overcast and foggy. From the looks of it, there didn’t seem to be anyone home. Despite a smidgen of doubt, I reaffirmed my steadfast, manly faith in printed directions. I double-checked the address, then rang the bell. Becca answered. She stood in the doorway, always taller than I remember, her strawberry blond hair pulled back and a big, sweet smile on her face.

She tilted her head just a bit to the left and said, “V.”

“Becca.”

We embraced.

Michael stood behind her and Grandma behind him. I was ushered into the fine old house, spotless and modest. Did I want lemonade or iced tea? Grandma Amstutz carried a pitcher of lemonade and four glasses onto the back porch and we fumbled joyfully through small talk. The chatty dachshund seemed to like me.

After draining our glasses, we departed for a pre-lunch exploration of the rectilinear byways of the Ohio countryside. The farmland was still bare or covered with new green. Proud barns with acolyte silos lorded over congregations of dusty outbuildings, casting nets of white fence everywhere. In the fields, mighty horses pulled plows, and in the yards, wash hung limply on lines. The farm folk always waved as we passed by. Kids were dressed identically as their parents. Walking beside the road, a man in overalls, navy blue long-sleeved shirt, and straight-brimmed straw hat held onto the hand of tiny, perfect version of himself.

They brought me to a rambling emporium called Lehman’s, which strives to meet all the simple requirements of the farm communities while anticipating summer tourists’ insatiable need for stuff. The practicality and impracticality of the abundance extended to fifty types of hatchet; psychedelic displays of seed packets; stiff, tubular denim trousers in every imaginable size except ‘fat’; and Amish romance novels.

I guess we had been working up an appetite. By the time we got back to the farm, Grandma Amstutz had laid out an epic meal – a plump breast of chicken accompanied by egg noodles, mashed potatoes, stuffing, asparagus, and crescent rolls. I had scarcely wiped my chin when appeared a mountainous apple pie and coffee. If I were heading back to the fields I would have energy to burn, however, after such a painfully hearty lunch I was predisposed to snooze.

Becca and Michael had other plans for me, but first, she beckoned – “V, come to the springhouse.” Behind the farmhouse, the whitewashed springhouse was tucked into a hollow, two rooms stacked one on top of another. Small windows flanked the thick door that opened with the gravitas of a bank vault. In the half-light hung a rich, chill dampness. The smell was elemental. A stone trough stretched against the back wall, filled with cold water of unearthly transparency. Opposite the trough was a great fireplace with a heavy kettle suspended above the swept hearth.

“Everything happened in the springhouse,” said Becca, “It was the center of existence.” “I see,” I said, really seeing.

We stepped out into the now bright May air.

I pushed on to Ashland, Ohio, site of the conference. Tedious interstate unspooled before me. I scanned my directions anxiously. Ashland lay between Columbus and Akron and I half-expected it to be the Ohio equivalent of those moribund New England mill towns, a hodge-podge of seen-better-days with a hollowed-out downtown and weary streets of unhappy houses. The new green on the trees that lined the streets provided a scrim of promise.

I picked up my room number and key and my sheets and towels. The dorm was a three-story, motel-style slab at a right angle to a busy intersection. The rest of the university sprawled across the street, in a mid-20^th century industrial park sort of way. Lavish beds of tulips, generous swaths of color, softened the utilitarianism. Remarkably for a one hundred and twenty-five year-old institution, no building predates World War II. Ash U had nurtured a fine nonfiction literary magazine called River Teeth which sponsored this conference.

Perhaps the most striking feature of Ashland University was its rococo fetishizing of memorabilia. Every vertical surface of every building displayed framed and captioned photos, documents, posters, and tchotchkes, as well as trophies, beanies, balls, and plaques. Every corridor was a walk down somebody’s memory lane and every staircase a spillway of arcana to an end so trivial that all you registered were the bouffants, bellbottoms, and vaguely familiar celebrities. One could not help but observe a dismaying partiality for magicians and Republicans.

Back in the fall, when I submitted my ‘manuscript’, I asked for an ‘assessment.’ No one had seen the thing, a swiped-together collection of personal essays, since its days as a master’s thesis. I discarded about forty percent in favor of current writing. In addition to the many other stimulating aspects of a gathering of like-minded writers, the opportunity for someone of reputation to read my writing and proffer their opinion had me vibrating with apprehension. While I’m not shy about letting other people see my work, I can sometimes play a very self-manipulative game with fantasy outcomes.

We sit at a picnic table in the quad in the afternoon shade. Kate, my reader, says I have a book here. She points out areas that need expansion and whole pieces that should be set aside. But she says I have a book, if I want. How about that.

Some people say the most splendid thing about a road trip to Ohio is the road trip from Ohio. A month ago I might have agreed. However, if you follow this simple itinerary, you may come away with affection for benighted, rustbelt, flyover, swing state Ohio. Spring is a good time to go.

I had signed up for a two-day nonfiction conference at a small university in a small university town in the middle of Ohio. The keynote speaker, Scott Russell Sanders, was someone whose work I respected. He had written a wrenching essay about his drunken old man I could not get out of my head. Once I decided to drive, I started examining the road atlas for possible routes. There is no getting around Pennsylvania if you want drive to central Ohio from New York City. Two basic corridors exist – Interstate 80 to the north and the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the south. Driving the full distance would take more than a day’s work: so, to break up the trip, where to stop? What’s beyond Harrisburg?

Fallingwater.

I could finally see Fallingwater – Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece that sits astride a stream in the western Pennsylvania forest. I have been an architecture nerd since a college survey course and I believe Fallingwater to be one of the supreme achievements of twentieth century art. So I went.

I dropped my things at a B&B nearby, then found some very good sushi, and ultimately wound up at the multiplex in time to be disappointed by Star Trek Into Darkness. Early the next morning I wound through wooded hollows pillowed with ground fog to the invisible town of Mill Run, Penna.

Wright built Fallingwater as a weekend home for department store magnates from Pittsburgh. They gave him free rein and what they got was a glory, a stack of cantilevered terraces that stunningly recapitulated the cascade below. The rugged watercourse added music to the breathtaking geometries, while the yellow-green leaves of spring seemed to respond by scattering counterpoints of light over everything. It felt like there was a breeze. The terraces levitated, suspended from a supple column of stone and glass by good fortune alone. Standing the great room, the boundaries of inside and the outdoors dissolved. Somehow, gravity didn’t operate. The sensation was almost Cubist in the way the sights and sounds and smells and textures activated each other. But there was no mistaking it for anything but a family home. It served their needs as it elevated their spirits. Entering Fallingwater fulfilled a persistent daydream.

Minutes after the graduate recommendation transaction, a ruckus about a missing prescription erupted between her and her home health aide. In seconds, Brigid was shrieking.

“Motherfucker!”

From her bed, she wheeled on the aide, her gaze incinerating everything.

“You stupid cunt. I gave you the piece of paper. I put it in your fucking hand.”

She forgot about me sitting there. I rose invisibly from the chair, let myself out, and walked east to my apartment. That was the last time I saw her. She probably knows I got into the MFA program, but not from me. Letting go of an old, rich, difficult friendship is hard. I used the no-fault clause and stopped calling, but I live with sorrow and tenderness. I try not to regret, but I often wind up playing tetherball with rationalization.

Our relationship had been yielding steeply diminishing returns. We always cared about each other, but we didn’t need each other. That was the beauty part, but it meant there was an element of expediency between us. We could carry on like schoolgirls, then go about our hyper-self-reliant way. But now came her hour of need and I couldn’t hack it. I barely had the emotional resources to cope with my ancient parents and their endless decline. But, jesus, she loved me, she did, and she loved my daughters, particularly Alice.

When Alice applied to boarding school, she had to write an essay about the person she most admired. She picked Brigid. Not Hillary Clinton. Not some figure skater. Not some pop star. She wrote, “I admire Brigid because she lives her life exactly the way she wants to.” and she went on to recount a story Brigid would tell of her girlhood in the Bronx.

Brigid lived with her parents and four sisters in a second-floor apartment a block from the Bronx Zoo. One afternoon, at St. Clare of Assisi Elementary, the Sister explained to the class that people went to heaven because people had souls. “What about animals?” asked Brigid, always with an eye out for controversy. “No, dear, animals can’t accept the sacraments,” said Sister. Young Brigid went right home, poured the Holy Water from the household font into a Mason jar, replacing the blessed liquid with water from the kitchen tap. The sun was going down, so, with one of her little friends in tow, they snuck into the zoo and went from cage to cage, baptizing the animals. Alligators and crocodiles were too scary, but the lonesome okapi, the first of its kind in North America, was in particular need.

The two of us were walking up Church Street one afternoon after an AA meeting. The day was sunny, but summer was definitely over. Brigid belonged to a playwriting workshop and she bemoaned the obstacles inherent in collaborating with ‘cheapskates and no-talent hypocrites.’ That day she made me a proposition.

“I got this play, V.”

“The old saloon thing? When does your O’Neill period finally end?”

“Asshole. This is the other one and you’re directing it.”

“Yeah, right, Bridge.”

I’d just come out as a gay man, left the wife, the two young daughters, the dog, the cat, and the yellow Oldsmobile station car, and moved back into Manhattan. I was uncomfortable with everything about myself. I would have preferred to stay miserable, but Brigid told me to do this thing, so I said ‘yes’. I could feel my ass falling off. All of sudden, I had responsibility for unfamiliar and complex situations. The play had a cast of eight, two acts, a budget of $1500, and a run of two weekends on a makeshift stage in the common room of a nursing home on the Upper West Side.

It was called Since Big Al’s Come to Town. Big Al, insisted Brigid, was another name for AIDS, though no one could hear that without snorting into their sleeve. Set in a large Upper East Side apartment, the play was not about AIDS, but followed eight yuppies as they dealt with yuppie dilemmas in yuppieville. The one gay character, Glenn, a sadsack of hapless unfuckability, couldn’t even qualify as The Specter Of AIDS.

I put an ad in Backstage, held auditions in my living room, and in a week, had the play cast. By the third rehearsal, half the actors had quit. Brigid had written a potboiler all right, but she had stuffed it with tedious quotations from the dim literary past. You could see a speech coming from a mile away: some character would lean back on his heels, put his thumbs under his lapels, and yawn, “As George Santayana would say…”

The play sucked. My cast rebelled. The producer stonewalled my ideas. Meanwhile, Brigid attended every rehearsal. She didn’t really intrude, but she resisted altering any but the least problematic lines. Then, one night right before rehearsal, I got a phone call from her son.

“V, my mom’s in St. Vincent’s. She fell on Fourteenth Street and broke both her elbows.”

I called the producer. “Buck up, boy,” he said, “this might not be so bad.” The nursing home space had already been paid for. Most everything else was in place. As I prepped for that night’s rehearsal, it dawned on me, now I had sole custody. Out went every gasbag quote. Thus shorn, Big Al became a chatty melodrama, one young woman’s decision to chuck the accoutrements of ’80s New York City and move to the west of Ireland to find spiritual renewal. The cast found it hard to complain about having to forget lines. We had three more weeks of rehearsal and it all fell together.

On opening night, Brigid got a pass from the hospital. Her health was precarious even then. Two broken elbows was major. At the curtain call, she stood up and turned to the crowd to acknowledge the applause. The room gasped. Not only was she was flying on Percodan, but she looked like she was about to become airborne. She had been welded or duct-taped into a contraption. Two rods sprang from a girdle around her waist and held her bent arms immobile at chest height. I have occasionally reminded her she was there at Big Al’s Opening Night, but she usually tells me to shut the fuck up. And she either doesn’t know I thoroughly overhauled her play, or she has held her tongue.

My stabs at self-expression continued. Two years later, busy Mr. Director Man received his Certificate in Filmmaking from NYU. My thesis, a thirteen-minute, 16mm film called: Hi. My Name Is Valerie. And I’m a Codependent, chronicled the young woman’s very bad day. I wrote and directed the thing, which nowadays plays out as a semi-autobiographical fantasy. And I gave myself the role of Valerie’s sexually predatory boss. On some stenographic pretext, I called her into my office and wheedled, “I’ve been a naughty, naughty boy,” a signal for her to bend me over the desk, tie me up with her pantyhose, pull down my trousers, and wallop the bejesus out of my large white behind.

Poor Valerie. The film featured Brigid in the role of her mother. Valerie promises that she will be at Uncle Sean’s engagement party. “I deeply regret missing the last one.” Returning to her apartment to get ready, she plays a phone message from Mother. Brigid’s voice-over is still unspooling when Valerie, now all dressed for the party, closes the door behind her. The final scene has beleaguered Valerie being ushered into the party by Brigid with the words – “Look, everybody! Here’s Valerie! And she brought her umbrella!”

“The shells go on the floor.”

That was Brigid’s command to her clientele at The Back Fence. She worked there as the weekend cocktail waitress for decades, taking delight in sticking the adjective ‘sober’ onto her job description. The Fence has been on the corner of Bleecker and Thompson Streets since the end of WWII. Its ceiling and walls were painted black to hide the cobwebs and create a thirsty gloom. Tiny tables draped with red-and-white checked tablecloths clustered around the bar. Sawdust covered the floor. Brigid swanned around with her pencil stub and little pad, pitching bowls of whole peanuts onto customers’ tables, along with her terse injunction to dispose of the shells.

Sunday afternoons, the management let her host a poetry reading. The readers were twitchy or mopey and the poetry was rarely very good. Lots of poems about not getting – laid, paid, heat, respect, enough beer. One poem was all you were allowed; two if they were short or you were aggressive. You put your name on the list and waited to be called.

Brigid had been the grande dame of this salon for eons. She offered me my first-ever opportunity to read my work in public. I was inordinately proud of a sonnet I had composed while flunking out of college. In a fanciful attempt to graduate, I had taken a poetry workshop. I called the poem ‘Kissing My Ass Good-bye,’ applying what I hoped were Elizabethan cadences to a fantasy of having my backside actually disappear. The fourteen lines rhymed in hit-or-miss fashion, up to and including the final couplet – Condemned to wander celestial halls / A eunuch for want of ass, not balls.

Adding my name, I waited my turn. Nothing came of my poetic debut at The Fence, but I had taken a baby step. Every single creative undertaking I have attempted however tentatively; Brigid played a part. She has been my crabby muse.

I liked to show up at the Fence in the clear cold light of a late Sunday afternoon. With the place empty I could hang with her, sip on a diet Coke, and try to get a word in edgewise. One snowy Sunday, however, I found myself stuck sitting there with Alice, my nine-year-old daughter, listening with half an ear to a parade of luckless poems. Things perked up when Brigid announced the next reader would be two people.

The twosome jumped up, bouncy gray curls spilling out from the hoods of their puffy parkas. They clapped their mittens together and beamed. “We are the Acrobatic Poets.”

They unzipped their coats and kept peeling off their clothes. Uh-oh, here we go. Quickly and efficiently, they shimmied down to shiny lycra unitards, one red and one blue, and it became apparent they were a man and corresponding woman. “We believe poetry has been divorced from physicality for too long.” Backstroke flourish of four arms.

The red one crumpled to the floor in a slo-mo ‘S’ motion and lay on his back in the sawdust and peanut shells, then raised his arms and legs into the air in unison. Blue faced Red and, shifting her weight from one leg to the other, settled her midsection onto his outstretched feet and, stiffening, rose until she was parallel to the floor, one hand in his and the other holding a small leather-bound book. She craned her head back and read some verse that was completely beside the point. Several more dramatized contortions followed.

The grand finale consisted of a Y-shaped pose accomplished by Blue again faced Red and, holding his hands, stepped onto his bended knees. The pair leaned away from each another. As they balanced carefully, they let go of their near hands and faced the room, arms out-stretched, transported.

A swell of murmuring rose from the peanut shells and was, after several long moments, supplanted by erratic clapping. Acrobatic poetry: we are still astonished.