knowing me by my place

The homepage of our website, daily headspa, is always a photograph of the day's calendar page. On one post-it-note on the page is a quote relating to the topic of the week; on another is a link to the main blog where we do different things with the weekly topic for every day of the week: Mondays introduce it, Tuesdays get into it a bit, Wednesdays really dig in, Thursdays do something about it, Fridays go out looking for it, Saturdays have fun with it, and Sundays make some sacred space around it.

On yesterday's homepage post-it-note quote, I used a quote from Mark Strand. I was really happy to come across a quote by this contemporary American poet because he links me to a couple of places that are important to my story.

Strand went to college with my parents at a place called Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. It was a place of myth and legend in the family because of how it shaped my parents lives. They met there. They were there at a pivotal time in history, the time of Korean vets on the GI bill and co-op jobs in New York City and Detroit when those cities were both full of jazz and bustle.

I made a pilgrimage there with my dad a couple of years before he died. Paul and I were living in Cleveland and dad came up for his birthday in August. Summers in Ohio are perfect for road trips; all green leaves and blue skies. We called in a Ye Olde Trail Tavern for a beer, home to dad's famous pizza making feats of old. And we caught up with a good friend of theirs, a woman named Sue Clauser who wrote "A Girl Named Sooner" and screenplays for the show "Bonanza." She also told us about traveling the world on freighters, and the time she wrote the screenplay for a Johnny Cash movie about an illiterate man. The Man in Black used to call the house to sing to her, checking to see what she thought of the lyrics for songs for the movie. I remember her sun porch, a cool drink, and the stories.

I knew Strand went to Antioch but I didn't know he also went to Yale, one of my old haunts. That place shaped my life every bit as much as Antioch shaped mom and dad's, but for different reasons. I didn't make pizzas there, but I ate plenty of them. I'm not feeling particularly nostalgic about the old ivy-covered walls but maybe that's because I remember it in the spring and fall, two seasons that we don't get here in the tropics. That place opened doors for me that I never thought were possible...this place I'm at now is somehow because of it. And that's good enough to look back on it with a smile.