Still more triangulation of a sort

Well now. Here’s a lovely essay by Friend of Korrektiv Garrison Keillor about growing up in the Midwest and staying there. Included is this bit of literary daydreaming:

When my mother was nearing the end of her 97 years, what was most vivid to her was her youth. She said, “There is so much I’d still like to know, and there’s nobody left to ask.” So she ventured into the shadows to commune with her dead, which was a comfort to her. Nobody was alive who knew her in girlhood, so memory became reality. Some call it dementia, I call it imagination. At 71 I sometimes forget last week, but I clearly remember the big house on Dupont Avenue North where Corinne lived one summer when we were 19, and I blew smoke on her African violets to kill aphids. She and I had this idea to form a commune of writers all working away in their rooms, doors open, and when we wrote something good, we could walk into someone’s room and tell them about it. A sort of long-term sleepover. It was a perfect idea, and we didn’t bother with details such as Who and Where and How much, and because it never became a reality, it never came crashing down. It still exists in my mind. If I reach 97, I may finally go live there.

“A commune of writers all working away in their rooms, doors open,” is not the worst description of the Korrektiv that I’ve ever heard.  And we should rent that house for Gerasene one year. Maybe after we go to The Duffer’s Lodge.

The third point on the triangle? Check Keillor’s caption for the above photo:

An old bus, restored, like the one I rode back and forth to the U. I dearly loved school, and the sight of a bus cheers me up—if it stopped, and I boarded it, I might be 22 again and on my way to Allen Tate’s poetry seminar.

Tate to Gordon to Percy – yer out! (For that matter, Suitable Accommodations tells of a brush between Powers and Tate…)