I put some of these photos on my insta grid today, but perhaps you wisely stay away from that, so I wanted to share them (and some extras) with you here.
I was back in New Haven last night to visit someone close to me and to see her best friend in a dance performance, and it was all great.
I then got up early this morning to go to Patricia’s Restaurant for breakfast. If you’re not already a fan of my google maps review of this restaurant from two years ago, I STAND BY EVERY WORD. )
Patricia was still there this morning. But her sons were not.
Long ago, when I thought I would live cheaply in New Haven and work at the video store FOREVER, I would go to Patricia’s, and her two little sons would be playing in the corner.
Two years ago, when I wrote my world famous Patricia’s review, I had come back to New Haven visit this person I mentioned above.
Her life is not mine, so I won’t say more about her.
But I will talk about Patricia’s children. As per the review, one of those sons was now impossibly in his thirties, and he was my waiter.
This morning, he was gone too. And soon my own person will be saying goodbye to New Haven, and my excuse to come back will have dried up.
Sorry to get wistful. Nostalgia is a toxic impulse. But it’s not nostalgia when the corned beef hash is EXACTLY THE SAME, ie PERFECT.
After breakfast I went to the college library to go visit the L&B Reading Room.
This was a great big beautiful room with great big ridiculous green vinyl chairs tucked into dark nooks. These nooks were good for reading, but better for slouching into and staring into the courtyard.
Properly slouched, you would feel that time had stopped.
But time didn’t. So a few years ago they shut it down to wash and brush it up, pull up the carpet, re-do the chairs, and scrape all the cigarette smoke residue from the carved woodwork.
It had been under renovation for YEARS, so neither I nor the person I was visiting could go in it until literally days ago. She really likes it, which I find very gratifying, since I loved that room and had taken some very important naps in there.
They did a good job spiffing it up, even though the chairs smaller and less nappable, covered in new brown leather and smelling of it. I sat in one for a while and wrote the last sentence that I just typed to you.
I wish I could have spent more time there, but the warped clock moves in one direction and I had to drive home.
Before I left I checked the shelves to see if they had one of my books there. That would have been a very exciting full circle. But no dice. For some reason, however, the poet John Hodgens did make the cut.
I’m sure he’s great, but he’s my enemy forever.
I hate to admit this, but before leaving, I tried to log in to the computer directory to see if they might have at least one copy of VACATIONLAND floating around somewhere.
I couldn’t log in to the computer, though. So I thought I’d check the old card catalogue drawers, which line a huge wall of the transepts of the library’s cathedral like lobby.
It was totally dumb, as I think those drawers were out of use even when I was a student there. But vanity is my boss, and so I pulled out a numbered drawer at random, and instead of cards discovered this:
I opened more and more drawers, and they were all filled with notes. A lot seemed to be from high schoolers who dropped their wishes into these wooden well when touring the college.
Others were pleas for international pen pals.
Others were very specific and personal.
Some felt like puzzles…
But most were messages of cheer and consolation. Addressed, I suspect, to the universe, or to the inner self of the person who wrote them, but functioning also as encouragement to any John Hodgman who came upon them.
Of course I had to leave my own message. In fact two messages: one on each side of a piece of paper torn from my notebook.
Maybe you will find it some day. But since you are a member of a secret society, I will give you a hint to one side at least.
It’s a quote from the Third Stage Guild Navigator in David Lynch’s DUNE:
(I actually misremembered the quote, but what I wrote conveyed the same paradox, which I felt keenly as I left New Haven and all these memories behind: “I WAS NEVER HERE.”)
As for the message on the other side of the note?