You know that quote from Robert Burns? ...."The best laid schemes of mice and men..." and all that? Well, after all my talk about going to Walden, I did not get there. I did get within five miles of it, but when you are not driving the rental car, you can't always direct which way it goes and where it ends up. So, clearly, someday, I will have to return to fulfill this promise to myself.
I did many wonderful things in Boston and its surrounding hamlets. I ran along the Charles River many days in a row and watched the rowers in their long skinny crew boats skim like water bugs across the surface. I marched around Harvard Square and spent too much time and money in the Harvard Bookstore. I walked in the shadow of the Waltham Watch Factory , made my way to the very tip of Cape Cod and Provincetown, and spent some time by the Three Sisters Lighthouses, which was something of a spiritual pilgrimage, given that I am one of Three Sisters myself and I have a good notion of what such a Triumvirate entails. It was strange and wonderful to realize that I was walking the haunts of some great writers even as I explored these places. Anne Bradstreet. Louisa May Alcott. Emily Dickinson. Thoreau. Robert Lowell. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Kurt Vonnegut. All of these writers lived in or near Boston at some time or another in their lives. I was overwhelmed and intimidated but also glad that I knew enough to recognize their names and know their works.
It made me realize that I have truly been a lifetime reader. Books and these writers have been my companions and friends. Through books, I can time travel to these writers and their lives, and I can better experience the layers of a place and the generation of human history even as I pass briefly through it. Walden, remains fixed in my imagination for now. The week after I left, my son sent me a text. "Swimming in Walden Pond!" it said. "Fantastic."
Next time. Oh, next time.
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