I knew “Cracker Barrel” as a brand of cheddar cheese my mother sometimes bought when we were kids. The recent brouhaha over “branding” informed me it’s also the name of a chain of restaurants, one of which shares a parking lot with the motel on the West Side of Cleveland where I’m staying. I’d eaten nothing since leaving Houston early Tuesday morning and was feeling hungry, not picky.  Eating alone in a restaurant always feels a little awkward – and extravagant. It’s a kid’s dream, an experience you want to milk. You can order what you want and as much as you want. The menu at Cracker Barrel isn’t afraid of a little cholesterol, though I was prudent – meatloaf, fried okra, cole slaw, biscuits. Normally I’m a tofu-and-hummus kind of guy, but I was feeling not only hungry but very American.   My waiter looked to be about twelve and was desperate to please. I had to reassure him several times that the food was filling and good. He almost begged me to order dessert, which I never eat. Then he handed me a check for fifty-seven dollars and change. Wrong table. I thought he was about to perform seppuku. He handed me the right check: under ten bucks. I left a fiver under my plate and remembered John Updike’s “The Grief of Cafeterias”:   “Everyone sitting alone with a sorrow, overcoats on. The ceiling was stamped of tin and painted over and over. The walls are newer, and never matched. SALISBURY STEAK SPECIAL $1.65. Afterwhiffs of Art Deco chrome, and the space is as if the space of the old grand railroad terminals has been cut up, boxcarred out, and reused. SOUP SALAD & SANDWICH $1.29 Nobody much here. The happiness of that at least—of vacancy, mopped. Behind cased food, in Hopper light, The servers attend to each other forever.”

“[William] Somervile has tried many modes of poetry; and though perhaps he has not in any reached such excellence as to raise much envy, it may commonly be said at least, that ‘he writes very well for a gentleman.’”   The well-read reader new to Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on Their Works (1779-81), the product of six years of Johnsonian labor, can be forgiven his confusion. Who is this gentleman, Somerville? Who is the endearingly named Thomas Tickell? And where among the fifty-two biographical/critical sketches included by Johnson are Spenser and Donne? No poet writing before the Restoration appears in Johnson’s final masterpiece, and none who were still alive (no Cowper, no Chatterton). He tells us he wrote the Lives “in my usual way, dilatorily and hastily; unwilling to work and working with vigour and haste.”   The work was commissioned as a publishers’ venture. Basically, Johnson accepted the list of approved subjects chosen by a group of booksellers from roughly the century preceding what we know as the Age of Johnson. That leaves Johnson’s savage, amusing, mistaken, shrewd, sentimental, baffling profiles of Milton, Pope, Dryden, Swift and dozens of more obscure figures. Johnson’s book, in other words, cannot be read as an efficiently arranged survey of English verse in the manner of a Norton anthology. No, we read it for Johnson, his loves and aversions, his insights into poets as men. We’re intrigued by what Johnson chooses to include. They make for good reading, their unique mingling of critical judgments and gossip. Take one example drawn from the seven paragraphs devoted to Somerville:   “His great work is his Chase [1735], which he undertook in his maturer age, when his ear was improved to the approbation of blank verse, of which, however, his two first lines give a bad specimen. [‘The Chase I sing, hounds, and their various breed, / And no less various use. O thou, great Prince!’] To this poem praise cannot be totally denied.  He is allowed by sportsmen to write with great intelligence of his subject, which is the first requisite to excellence; and though it is impossible to interest the common readers of verse in the dangers or pleasures of the chase, he has done all that transition and variety could easily effect; and has with great propriety enlarged his plan by the modes of hunting used in other countries.”   For a reader without interest in hunting or its celebration in verse, The Chase is resistant to comfortable reading. Poetic conventions of the time make it read as though written in an unfamiliar dialect of English:   “Awed, by the threatening whip, the furious hounds Around her bay; or, at their master’s foot, Each happy favourite courts his kind applause, With humble adulation cowering low. All now is joy. With cheeks full-blown they wind Her solemn dirge, while the loud-opening pack The concert swell, and hills and dales return The sadly-pleasing sounds. Thus the poor hare, A puny, dastard animal! but versed In subtle wiles, diverts the youthful train.”   Somerville was born on this date, September 2, in 1675, and died in 1742 at age sixty-six.

I work hard to resist sentimental impulses and indulgence in nostalgia. Ours is a sentimental age, and at the same time an angry, unforgiving age. One strain of sentimentality especially prevalent among the aging is a rueful, self-pitying lament for what no longer exists. This might include manners, linguistic turns, obsolete technologies, movies “when they were still good.” The world we grow up in tends to become the only world, indelibly pressed into our sensibilities. Deviation from the template is second-best at best. I’m sympathetic but understand how tiresome this sounds to younger people. Part of maturing is accepting that which seems shoddy or meretricious, a falling off from previous perfection.  My niece’s daughter turns two this week. Hannah tells me she loves to “read,” so when I arrive in Cleveland on Wednesday I want to make a birthday present of books. I’m giving her the copy of David Wiesner’s Tuesday (1991), a wordless picture book loved sequentially by all three of my sons, and read – or, rather, spontaneously narrated -- a thousand times by me. Most of the dust jacket is missing – evidence of its popularity.   I wanted to include a couple of new books. I haven’t set foot in one of the retail chain bookstores in many years. Books represent the only sort of shopping I’ve ever enjoyed. So I entered a Barnes and Nobles located just a few miles away, with the customary sense of anticipation I feel whenever entering a book collection. I phrase it that way because I get a similar tingle when entering a library. I’m always hopeful when it comes to books.   I would estimate that fifty percent of the visible stock didn’t qualify as “book” or even “reading material.” I’m not naïve. I’ve shopped at Barnes and Noble before. I remember in Albany, N.Y., in the early nineties, when a B&N opened just blocks away from a Borders (R.I.P.). If one store didn’t have what I wanted, I would drive to the other. On Sunday, the Barnes and Noble recalled an unholy merger of grade-school classroom and tourist trap – coffee mugs, tote bags, stuffed animals and other toys. Merchandise.   I rode the escalator to the second floor where the children’s book section is located. A clerk was standing at the computer, entering data for the heaps of board books stacked on her counter. I asked where I could find books by writers – favorites of my sons decades ago -- whose names I had written down. All were unfamiliar to her. She never made eye contact. As I read the names, she entered them into the digital catalogue. Nothing showed up. I thanked her and explored the shelves myself, and eventually found two books I thought a little girl I don’t know very well might enjoy. I felt the way I feel when leaving a shoe store.

I first encountered the word palimpsest more than half a century ago in Flann O’Brien’s 1939 novel At Swim-Two-Birds and found it immediately useful. Here’s the OED’s strict, non-figurative definition:  “A parchment or other writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, and then overwritten by another; a manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (effaced) writing.”   In other words, a much-edited text with revisions superimposed on earlier versions – a text layered like an archaeological dig. I think of Marcel Proust’s manuscripts. More central to my thinking is the figurative use of palimpsest as a metaphor for memory. In a literal sense, I carry around mental maps of every place in five states where I have lived. The earliest date from my childhood in suburban Cleveland. In that immediate turf I can get around just fine but in subsequent decades, freeways have been constructed and buildings and other landmarks have been torn down. Trees have sprouted and others cut down. I know from previous visits that Cleveland is half-charted territory, and I can’t always trust my memory of the geography.  When I visit next week for my fifty-fifth high-school reunion, I’ll rely on my niece and nephew as navigators.   I haven’t lived in Cleveland and environs since 1977 and not in Ohio since 1983. I'm flying there Wednesday. It’s prudent to recall that memory is a function of the imagination. Cops know this when they interview witnesses to crimes. The mind fills in the blanks, consciously or otherwise. It pays to be skeptical of our memories, no matter how fond we are of them. Also, the unconscious is timeless. It’s still 1961 in there, and 1998. Thomas De Quincey understood. He first published in Blackwood’s Magazine an essay that became part of Suspiria de Profundis, a collection left unfinished at the time of his death in 1859 but intended as a sequel to his Confessions of an English Opium Eater.   “What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, oh reader, is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished. And if, in the vellum palimpsest, lying among the other diplomata of human archives or libraries, there is anything fantastic or which moves to laughter, as oftentimes there is in the grotesque collisions of those successive themes, having no natural connection, which by pure accident have consecutively occupied the roll, yet, in our own heaven-created palimpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, there are not and cannot be such incoherencies.”