'God Keep Me Extroverted'

A scene that might have been noted by Chekhov, had he lived a few decades longer and made his way to the United States instead of dying in Germany in 1904:

“A little man in a lunchroom who served me delicious coffee and an immaculate sandwich, all set out on a tray spread with a pristine napkin, almost had me in tears, because he put such faith in a new electric sign that someone had sold him. When illuminated this sign goes through all the colors of the rainbow—they fade off—he told me about it with such hope and passion. Then he slyly started the popcorn machine, poor dear, and I bought a whole bushel with my remaining money. God keep me extroverted so that I can always see such saintly little men.”

The anecdote is poignant in its mundanity. It’s true to my understanding of the way memory works. Nominally important events can be blurred while the trivial remain vivid. Louise Bogan describes the scene in a letter to the anthropologist Ruth Benedict on April 16, 1929 (A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, 2005). Bogan is living in Hillsdale, N.Y., in Columbia County, a place in my memory of horses, apple orchards and the birthplace of Martin Van Buren and Ichabod Crane. For Bogan as for Chekhov, the commonplace, the sad and the ridiculous are perfectly compatible – in fact, inevitably joined. That’s our humanity.

Hillsdale is about twenty miles south of Chatham, where the Horwitz brothers – better known as Moe, Curly and Shemp -- spent their summers a few years before Bogan arrived.