Edinburgh Days, or Doing What I Want to Do

No Place like Home

No Place like Home Oceans separate Connecticut from Scotland, only one geographical. In part I came to Edinburgh in hopes that different surroundings would affect my thought. My ideas were weary, and my metaphors dusty. Political doings blighted optimism, and instead of bouncing through days marveling at the wonder of fall and winter, I limped along, halt and so gloomy that I was partially blind. In Edinburgh I imagined new experience scratching my mind like heather, sharp but fragrant, ripping barky attitudes away, freeing both heartwood and matters of the heart so they could swell and throb. To a large extent I realized my hope. Nevertheless, oceans are not as broad as they once were. When a person travels, home follows closer than his shadow at noon. Electronic mail is the contemporary clipper ship, crossing seas billowed by electrons . “Will no one,” Josh wrote me two weeks ago, “toss the moneychangers out of the White House and bundle them off to Beelzebub’s Bosom?” Moreover, at times Edinburgh almost seems an American city. Packs of American tourists roam the streets, and hundreds of Americans attend the university, transforming foreign study into home study. And, of course, after a time a person becomes so acclimated that any place seems home. Eventually one ceases to explore, and living slips into a pattern . Days become regular, as if regularity were a virtue and not a failing , a sign that a person has vanished into convention. People treat timetable adjectives, dependable and punctual, for example, as praise. They associate with “regular guys,” dullards who never disturb givens, 146 Edinburgh Days no matter what the givens are. To be known as a good fellow costs life itself. So that one does not lose things, he finds places for them and puts them there every day, in the process losing the person he might have become. Moreover, no matter how lightly one travels, he carries a mind stuffed with the familiar, in my case characters from Carthage, Tennessee. To some degree the characters live for me, enabling me to spend days simply , and dully. Last Monday Queen Mary II died in Carthage. Originally Queen Mary was a Sweedle from Maggart, second cousin to Puggie Sweedle, who after being arrested for bigamy got off by becoming a Mormon. Two decades ago Mary founded her own church, in the process christening herself Queen Mary II, for the record there being no Mary I. Within four months, she had collected a congregation of over a hundred people, in part because she had “a magic goiter.” The goiter was as big as a honeydew melon. When she preached, it swung back and forth like a pendulum, hypnotizing auditors. Indeed, when Dr. Ramsbottom, dean of the Vanderbilt Medical School, heard about her death, he exclaimed, “Oh, dear, what a pity, we have lost the finest goiter in Tennessee and probably in the whole South.” Because Queen Mary preached as the spirit moved her, the sermons did not make sense. Still, she was worth hearing. In an age of conformity good nonsense is more difficult to produce than good sense, and in middle Tennessee Mary became better known than Ishbosheth, the second king of Israel. On sunny days her congregation worshiped outside on the top of Sugarsuck Hill. She required members of the church to shave their heads, leaving only a pigtail at the back. “So that,” she explained, “when the Lord wants you, an angel can swoop down from the clouds and grabbing your pigtail tote you to heaven, bypassing expensive visits to the doctor and that unpleasant layover at the funeral home.” During Mary’s lifetime an angel fetched only one member of her congregation. Even then, doubters said he drowned on a fishing trip— high water, Hoben Donkin declared, sweeping the body out of the Cumberland into the Tennessee River, where gars converted it into appetizer . In any case other members of the church who died were buried in the Mountain Graveyard in Carthage, Queen Mary, however, forbidding family members to engrave dates on the stones, saying such things were trifling when the subject was eternity. Of course writing about Queen Mary when a tree has already been chopped down for my coffin is also trifling. Still, the mind is not a valise, No Place like Home 147 and a person cannot control its packing and unpacking. Queen Mary wrote hymns, all derivative...