It’s a comfort to know people who know you. Cleveland has become a semi-ghost town. My brother, parents, teachers, most friends and former co-workers are dead. My niece and nephew are here and so are two of my oldest friends, the artists Gary and Laura Dumm. Gary and I met in 1975 while working as clerks at the late, lamented Kay’s Books. He was then on the cusp of working with Harvey Pekar (1939-2010) on his autobiographical comic book American Splendor (“From Off the Streets of Cleveland”), later adapted as a movie. I thought of Housman: “And friends abroad must bear in mind / Friends at home they leave behind.” That’s what I was doing.  On Friday my nephew and I visited the Dumms at their home on the West Side of Cleveland. For five hours we talked without once uttering the president’s name – surely a triumph of maturity and good taste. No talk at all of politics or sports, the most common and tedious conversational fodder. Our talk mingled reminiscences, gossip and plain old storytelling. Conversation ceased only when Abe and I had to meet his girlfriend for dinner. Gary, Laura and I confirmed Dr. Johnson’s observation: “The friendship which is to be practised or expected by common mortals, must take its rise from mutual pleasure, and must end when the power ceases of delighting each other.” No end in sight.

Alpha and Omega, originally published in 1915, is the third title in Marginalian Editions. Below is my foreword to the new edition, as it appears in on its pages. “Have faith,” someone I loved said to me, holding my face in her hands — the face of a lifelong atheist. And suddenly, there in the lacuna between love and reason, in the warmth between her palms, I found myself reckoning with the meaning of faith — this ancient need for something to keep us from breaking the possible on the curb of the known, to keep the heart from breaking… read article

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My nephew and I spent the morning going through a plastic storage box filled with photos, documents, newspaper clippings and other oddments Abe inherited from my brother after his death last year. What did we find?  My mother’s 1920 birth certificate (“Legitimate?” “Yes”).   The naturalization certificate of my paternal grandfather, Charles Kurpiewski, a Polish immigrant, dated September 17, 1920. My mother’s autograph book. An entry dated December 7, 1939 (two years to the day before Pearl Harbor), signed by Marion Kolorrics, addressed “Dear Edyth [sic]”:   “Love is to the human heart, What sunshine is to flowers, But friendship is the truest thing, In this cold world of ours.”                  My parents’ marriage license (“to solemnize the Marriage Contract between the persons aforesaid”) signed by Probate Judge Nelson J. Brewer on September 19, 1950.   A booklet titled “The Marriage Service” signed by the Rev. Elmer G. Wiest of Trinity Evangelical and Reformed Church on W. 25th Street in Cleveland on September 16, 1950.   An album of photos taken on my parents’ wedding day. My mother was thirty-one, my father was thirty and still had hair. They look impossibly young. A picture of my mother’s four brothers, all in tuxes, looks like an outtake from The Godfather. A photo of my Uncle Virgil toasting with a bottle of whiskey and my Uncle Richard with a tankard of beer.   A photo of me, my parents and brother seated around a table at the Coach House in Strongsville, Ohio (“Family Style Dining”), on March 10, 1968 – my mother’s forty-eighth birthday. My father, typically, is scowling.   Back in my room I reread Delmore Schwartz’s story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” Me in junior high school, c. 1965:

What happens when a 60-year-old writer dons helmet and pads to compete under the Texas lights? The post A New Sweet Diminishment appeared first on The American Scholar.