A Pilgrim’s Digression

Yesterday morning, Brendan said to me, “When I’m fifteen years old, I’m going to stop drinking water.”

“Why would you want to do that?” I asked.

He replied, “Daddy, I’m going to taste a little coffee, and then I’m only going to drink coffee.”

Sometimes, you just have no idea where stuff comes from in a kid’s mind. We were in a hotel room, packing to leave for home, and Brendan had taken a drink of water from a bottle of water. Why this thought and these words occurred to him, who knows.

We spent the weekend in Richmond, which is why we were in a hotel. Lynn was attending a conference for foreign language instructors at the Holiday Inn Express in Midlothian, Virginia, a suburb cum strip mall outside the city of Richmond in Chesterfield County, and Brendan and I came along for the free hotel stay and another chance to see some more of Richmond. After she finished up Saturday afternoon, we spent some time exploring Richmond itself.

Richmond is a quaint, Southern city; its downtown has charm. The red bricks of the oldest buildings are mossy-dark and slightly decayed looking. The railroad trestles that pass over the historic Shockoe Slip district are rusted and ancient-looking.

Among the sites we saw in the historic district was a Gentleman’s Club called “Paper Moon”; a scantily-clad woman caught our attention as she crossed the street in front of us and went into the front door of the building.

Even the strip club looked like a historic building, however. Perhaps it was a historic strip club. Perhaps Jeff Davis stopped there once for a whiskey and a lap dance, slipping Confederate twenties into the panties of his dancer.

We skipped visiting the Museum of the Confederacy, located in the former Confederate White House. It’s supposedly one of the best Civil War museums in the United States, but I wanted to do something else, something I’ve been meaning to do ever since moving to Virginia.

I wanted to visit the Edgar Allan Poe museum. It was worth the difficulty we had in finding it for one reason alone: there, one will find on display a pair of Edgar Allan Poe’s socks. Amongst all the other Poe artifacts, the socks are really the one thing most worth seeing. The socks are not advertised as among the chief artifacts belonging to the museum, and they are rather hidden away in a small antechamber of the old house where the museum displays its relics of the poet. So it was quite a surprise to suddenly stumble upon them in a display case among other cases of first editions of Poe’s works.

In the display with the socks is a vest that was also found in Poe’s trunk at the time of his death (the trunk is on display, too, along with the trunk key, Poe’s walking stick, and a pair of boot hooks belonging to Poe). The white, silk stockings lie extended on what looks like white tissue paper. They are rather dirty at the heal and toe, and I could not help but imagine the poet, a few weeks before his death, padding about his cold, lonely room in his socks, not knowing that more than a hundred and fifty years later, people would be gawking at his used socks in a glass display case in a museum.

“He had very small feet, didn’t he?” Lynn says, as we press our noses to the glass, as if trying to see the very fiber of the silk.

“Tiny feet were considered a mark of male beauty in the nineteenth century,” I say, sniffing knowledgably. “Read Dickens and one comes across many references to men who had small feet, and they are all handsome, heroic types.”

“Those look like a woman’s silk knee highs,” Lynn says.

“He must have been a very small man,” I say. “Look at that vest; it looks like it could fit a child.”

“Perhaps his clothing has shrank over the centuries.”

“No, I think he was just small.”

“He had a big head, though.”

“Gosh, that is a huge head.”

“Arrgggh, no Brendan, don’t touch that!”

It’s almost impossible to enjoy any museum thoroughly when you are dragging along a child who is too big to be strapped tightly into a stroller.

But I feel like I was able to fully drink in the significance of seeing the poet’s socks. It was as if through his undergarments, Poe had spoken to me over the wall of the intervening centuries, and at that moment I began gestating a story I hope to write in the next couple days, with a working title of “The Poet’s Dirty Socks.”

On the way out, we bought a tee shirt for Brendan, and I bought a Poe action figure for my bookshelf in my office. As we were paying, I noticed an enlarged photograph hanging behind the register. It depicted a large, matronly, middle-aged woman standing next to the fountain we had just seen in the garden of the museum.

“That’s Gertrude Stein, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yes,” the clerk said. “You’re only the second person who has recognized her.”

I think he was flattering me; Stein is fairly easily-recognizable.

Still, there was something odd about the moment of recognition. Here was a photo of Stein standing there looking very touristy, in much the same way I must look touristy in the photo of me sitting next to the bust of Poe in the memorial grotto.

What a strange, magnificent country we live in, where the only national religion is the Cult of Personality. I love America.