fredonia and other tales

I was lucky enough to head out of here last Wednesday and spend three and a half days kicking around western New York. More specifically, I got to return to Fredonia. For forty-eight hours, the B and I ran around my old haunts--and we managed to do nearly everything that constitutes the Fredonia experience.

While the B gave a craft talk to the undergrads, I took off the afternoon and wandered around the places where I spent so much time curled up with a book or a cup of coffee: the concrete benches on campus, the secret tower reading room on the highest level of the library, the chairs underneath the soaring windows in the s0-very-70s McEwen Hall. I dragged him out for chicken finger subs at one o'clock in the morning and for a coffee-and-potato-rolls-and-double-chocolate-cookie breakfast at The Upper Crust. The B gave an amazing reading. I drank chai and visited with my former professor and her lovely family. And the whole time we were there, the weather was beautiful, so we drove with the windows down and it smelled like the same old place: mostly roasted peanuts, a little bit dead fish.

Things have changed, of course: the ancient dining hall where we used to trek for made-to-order omelets and French toast sticks has been revamped and remodeled. There's a Starbucks and a brand-new bookstore on its first floor. Some of the bars in town have new names and changed out the neon beer signs in their windows. I found myself wanting to call my old roommate no fewer than ten times--then realized that she's halfway across the world in Chengdu.

But the things that made Fredonia so very Fredonia were still there. It's still the cozy college campus in the little college town. And after that we spent a day or so in Buffalo: a day of Wegmans and sitting around table talking and eating shrimp with crusty bread and drinking big glasses of red wine. Even when we drove back here on what turned out to be a dark and rainy Saturday night, it was the two of us in the car, listening to new songs and discussing style guides and ways to teach creative writing and drinking hot chocolate.

The B left yesterday afternoon, and I miss the sounds of other people moving in other rooms. When I woke up this morning, it was fairly difficult to get out of bed, make coffee, and start the shower. I kept thinking that just the day before, I'd woken up next to somebody and we'd discussed what we wanted to do about breakfast. When we went out for eggs--at the place where I have coffee and toast on Sunday mornings, always by myself--my regular server said, Hey! I didn't think it was you at first because you brought somebody with you this time! And I said, I know, right?

But what I really thought was Ouch.

Today turned out to be a good day: it's getting easier and easier to get back into the Michigan mindset, and this evening I ended up at a friend's house and her boyfriend cooked us dinner. But I didn't finish my grading for tomorrow.

Tomorrow, I can tell my students part of the truth: that I didn't grade drafts this afternoon because I was hit with a pretty intense migraine and aura. That while I waited for the Imitrex to kick in I stretched out on my office floor and listened to songs from previous autumns: Mark Abis, Matt Pond PA, Teitur.

I won't tell them that I feel at home in Michigan some days--that I really, really like walking downtown to the bus, or running down the leaf-littered sidewalks. I won't say that I feel like this is a town where I could be happy, where I could see myself sticking around for a while. I won't say that some days are great and other days are maybe a little bumpier.

What I can say that is that I'll get their work turned around by Wednesday, that I'll stay up late and read what they have to say, sitting cross-legged in my Murphy bed with the dog curled at my feet. That I'm sorry. And I won't tell them that one day they'll understand--that they'll go out into the world and then know what it feels like to exist in a couple different spheres and not quite know, exactly, which one they consider home.