Red Cravat, First League, Sweet Hours

This past Sunday, the morning after AWP, my brother Michael picked me up at my hotel, and we drove north to Columbia, Maryland. It seemed strange that I'd never been to Columbia, Maryland, given my early interest in planned cities and the fact that I'd once pored over the map of the place for hours and hours, mesmerized by its nutty street names, sections named for the images in Dickinson's poems, images in Amy Lowell, Tolkien, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Frost, etc. (Red Cravat, First League, Sweet Hours Way.) I was too wiped out from the conference to expect much of anything, but once we turned left into The Birches, with its lake and its woodsided, modernist houses, my early desire to build cities of my own rose up in me. How had I become what I'd become? I couldn't speak for a minute, literally. Then we drove on to the supermarket, and it was just another American suburban supermarket, the people in the aisles no different from the people you'd see on the outskirts of any other city. So much for James Rouse's plan to eliminate racial, religious, and income segregation (sigh). It was a relief that I didn't have to think for one minute about cutting down trees, or displacing any deer, or dirtying any ponds or streams or wells. We got back in the car. We went on to Baltimore, where I got on the train, and I was fast asleep before we'd ever crossed the first branch of the Chesapeake.