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.

A longtime reader in England writes:  “I thought of you the other day. I was reading Trent’s Last Case published in 1913 by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. A description of one of the main characters reads:   “‘His austere but not unhappy life was spent largely among books and in museums; his profound and patiently accumulated knowledge of a number of curiously disconnected subjects which had stirred his interest at different times had given him a place in the quiet, half-lit world of professors and devotees of research; at their amiable, unconvivial dinner-parties he was most himself. His favourite author was Montaigne.’”   There’s not much about me that’s austere, nor am I at home among most academics,  but otherwise the passage is flattering. Montaigne is certainly on my short list of favorites. He’s the man who taught us how to write about the self and its place in the world without merely self-advertising. The self becomes a stand-in for the rest of humanity. The universal is rooted in the particular.   On Thursday my nephew and I visited Loganberry Books, the last remaining bookstore in Cleveland worthy of serious readers. I asked a clerk, a woman of roughly my age, where I could find the essay section (the sprawling floor plan requires a map). She explained that the closest section to what I probably wanted was called “Narrative Nonfiction.” There I found too much popular junk – Joan Didion, Mary Oliver, David Sedaris, et al. I refined my question and asked if they had a section corresponding to what used to be called belles-lettres. “Sadly, no,” she said, with what seemed like genuine regret. Then she led me to “Lit. Crit.,” where I found One Person and Another: On Writers and Writing (Baskerville Publishers, 1993) by the late American novelist Richard Stern. In an essay titled “Inside Narcissus,” Stern writes: “There is one maker who is driven to narcissism by his occupation. This is the writer,” which inevitably leads him to Montaigne:   “Centuries before Augustine, Horace praised his satiric predecessor Lucilius for laying out his whole life ‘as if it were painted on a votive tablet.’ It was, though, not till the late sixteenth century that a writer claimed that he wrote because he knew nothing special but himself. Montaigne puzzled over his self-assignment. ‘Is it reasonable,’ he asked, ‘that I, so fond of privacy in actual life, should aspire to publicity in the knowledge of me?’ He decided that this contradiction, like all others, was integral to his enterprise, which was revealing all of himself (mon être universel), or at least as much as decorum or caution allowed. ‘I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak.”

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.”

Timing is crucial in one’s reading life. Several people have advised readers to take on Proust’s masterwork only after their fortieth birthday. I first read it months before my eighteenth in the old C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation. Was much of it lost on me? Of course. I was callow and naïve, enthusiastic but ignorant. That’s part of the reason I read it again a decade later as I approached thirty. It was like reading a different novel and the experience convinced me of the obligation to reread the books that matter most to us. Now I retain in memory enough of Proust to return periodically to favorite passages. In 1999, I left a rose on his grave in Cimetière du Père Lachaise. Perhaps I’m deluding myself, but I fantasize about reading À la Recherche du Temps Perdu a third time. Proust is a rewarding obligation, like Shakespeare and Chekhov.  Around the time I first read Proust I also discovered the work of a far less significant writer, Sherwood Anderson. He charmed me then though I can no longer read his mushy prose. He is, I suspect, a young person's writer, unlike Proust. He was a fellow Ohio native and lived for a spell in Cleveland, my hometown. I bought a beat-up copy of Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a Viking Compass Book, from the long-defunct Kay’s Books on Prospect Avenue in downtown Cleveland, where I would go to work as a clerk several years later. That city block, which I will visit next week while visiting Cleveland, is yet another space charged with memories. A stray line from John Lennon comes to mind: “All these places had their moments . . .” In them, space and time intersect. One of the blessings and curses of life is memory. I’ve just remembered waiting at a bus stop downtown after visiting Kay’s and thinking I would write a collection of short stories titled Clevelanders, in homage to Joyce’s Dubliners. Naturally, it was never written.   Here are the final words of “Departure,” the final story in Winesburg, Ohio: “. . . the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.” Anderson based the fictional town of Winesburg on his childhood home, Clyde, seven miles northwest of Bellevue in north central Ohio. I moved to Bellevue in January 1981, about a week before President Reagan’s inauguration, and went to work as a reporter for The Gazette. I was twenty-eight and this was my first daily newspaper. Previously I had worked as the editor of the weekly paper in Montpelier, Ohio, about two hours to the west, near the Indiana and Michigan lines.     The Gazette closed in 2016 year after almost 149 years in business. Its owner, Civitas Media, switched to twice-a-week publication in 2015 but couldn’t keep the paper afloat. Its circulation was about 1,000, after peaking at 4,300 in the late nineteen-seventies, just before I got there. Civitas Media also owned and closed The Clyde Enterprise.   George Willard, the character leaving Winesburg on a westbound train in the passage quoted at the top, was also a newspaper reporter. Like him, I remember incidentals, small things, like meeting Pat Boone, and the smell of Aramis, the “men’s fragrance” our publisher seemed to apply with a paint brush, the city manager coming to work one winter on skis. George’s memories are folksier than mine:   “He thought of little things—Turk Smollet wheeling boards through the main street of his town in the morning, a tall woman, beautifully gowned, who had once stayed overnight at his father’s hotel, Butch Wheeler the lamp lighter of Winesburg hurrying through the streets on a summer evening and holding a torch in his hand, Helen White standing by a window in the Winesburg post office and putting a stamp on an envelope.”