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.”

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:

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.”