This morning we drove to the West Side Market at West 25th Street and Lorain Avenue, in Cleveland. The market and its iconic tower were built in 1912 (Hart Crane must have seen it) and the outside is a mosaic of buff-colored bricks. Inside are butchers, bakers, fishmongers, candy makers and dealers in dairy. The scents intoxicate. The produce vendors are housed next door in the arcade. We bought baguettes, smoked Swiss cheese, Russian tea cakes, catfish, red onions, cherry-vanilla muffins, smoked turkey, Braunschweiger, green beans and lemons. One of the butcher stalls displays a photograph of the same stall, run by the same family, dated 1916. Beside it was another photo from the same era of all the butchers working in the market, posed in front of the building. All wear spotless, blindingly white coats. There must be 75 men in the picture. Some of me recognizes the West Side Market, where we spent many Saturdays in our youth, as the epicenter of the American Experiment.
The city blew up a bridge last spring, so we took a circuitous detour. On Fulton Road we passed a tavern called Frenchie's Escape. Across the street and down the block was The Ugly Broad. We saw a guy on the sidewalk who looked like a dissipated Leon Russell, until we realized it was a woman. My oldest son, who just turned 20, plugged his iPod into the rental car's sound system and handled the soundtrack -- lots of Dylan, Howlin' Wolf, Louis Jordan, Louis Armstrong, Johnny Cash, and Tom Waits, who contributed this:
"Friday's a funeral and Saturday's a bride,
Sey's got a pistol on the register side.
And the goddam delivery truck,
They make too much noise,
And we don't get butter delivered no more.
In the neighborhood.
In the neighborhood.
In the neighborhood."
Emerson was wrong, but charmingly so:
"Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places."
Not so. Some places, suffused with History or at least with our private histories, matter very much. A few sentences later in "Self-Reliance," Emerson writes:
"I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go."
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Dear Patrick Kurp,
You find Emerson charmingly wrong but your evidence is entirely anecdotal, as I suppose it is entitled to be. Mine too. I remember feeling suicidal on the Acropolis (in April, 1978), all on account of a giant stalking me. Well, perhaps not a giant, but what Johnson and the tens of thousands of Anglophones with a literary bent who have shared his condition called 'black dog', a scary hound you don't find much mention of in the relentlessly upbeat travel brochures.
Curiously enough, I wrote to Michael Gilleland about 'My giant goes with me' in Emerson's essay today, just about half an hour before seeing your post, despite the fact that it isn't quoted in Bill Vallicella's original 'Reasons for Staying Home'. Congratulations, by the way,on your blog. I'm learning a lot.
Eric Thomson
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