Springfield, Illinois

Springfield, Springfield, it's a hell of a town? I don't know about that, but it is where I'm from, or at least where I spent much of my childhood. For me, it's the kind of place that you itch to leave, that you're happy to leave, but gain some appreciation for later on.

Much of that comes with having kids and finding that, in that situation, there are benefits to having things a bit simpler. During visits downstate, I recognize that there are things to like -- the slower pace, the managability of the daily run of life, the relative affordability, the lack of pretense and affectation. But living very near a big city is seductive, and becomes something that you get used to, as I have. As much as it is liberating to leave the city for a time, I would miss the restless energy.

Springfield has produced a few people of note, one of them Vachel Lindsay. Lindsay was a utopian and a dreamer, son of a well-to-do family who became a poet and a writer, resisting his family's efforts to push him into more practical pursuits. In his younger years he traveled the country, observing and writing about what he saw. I remember thinking, reading about this stage of his life in his biography, that he was something of a spoiled rich kid, repeatedly contacting his family for more money so that he could live like a wandering bohemian. Maybe. But I think he produced some things of value, and I do return to regularly and enjoy some of his poems, which capture a time, a place, and a certain way of looking at the world, pretty well.

For instance, Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight (In Springfield, Illinois). Here, it's hard for me to relate to the utopian longings of Lindsay's "spirit-dawn" and "white peace." I suspect Lindsay thought that some sort of ultimate peace was within reach if only people would reform their ways. I'm more of the opinion that war and conflict are permanent factors of our existence -- things that we can mitigate, but not eliminate entirely. When C.S. Lewis' said that "a foreign policy dominated by desire for peace is one of the many roads that lead to war," he summed it up for me.

But I'm still drawn to the poem, not so much because I think Lindsay's hope of world peace has even a shred of a chance of ever coming to pass. It's the picture he paints -- the"bronzed, lank man" who "cannot sleep upon his hillside" wandering through the backyards of Springfield in the midnight darkness. I've walked and ridden my bike through the rolling landscape of Oak Ridge Cemetery, where Lincoln is buried, and spent a lot of time in those Springfield backyards on muggy summer nights. When I'm at my mother's house even today, smoking a cigarette in the backyard at a late hour, I could almost imagine, for a moment, seeing the man with the high-top hat passing at a distance, near the high wooden fence by the alley.

A summer night

For the past few days, this scenario has been running through my mind: It's a summer night, right around twilight. You're a child, say 9 or 10 years old. You've been playing hard with your friends since after dinner, working up a sweat in the muggy August heat, and taking long drinks from the hose to ease your thirst. The cicadas are droning on, and lightning bugs are thick in the air.

Sooner or later, as the evening goes on, you hear the sound of a screen door opening and slamming. Your mother calls you -- it's time to come in. Tonight, though maybe not every night, you're the first to be called. Maybe you resist and beg for a few more minutes, and maybe you don't, but either way you end up coming in. Disappointment and annoyance follow. Can’t she see, you think, that the party’s still going on? You can still hear your friends, and long to still be part of the crowd playing and laughing and shouting outside; you wish for a night that did not have to end.

As much as we like to think we grow up, some things don’t leave us. Whatever our age, we all at one time or another feel like that kid who is the first to be called in. We feel envy toward our fellows for what they are able to enjoy and we can’t, envy that can turn into lingering resentment if we’re not careful.

What to do with it? George MacDonald said: “"Let me, if I may, be ever welcomed to my room in winter by a glowing hearth, in summer by a vase of flowers; if I may not, let me then think how nice they would be, and bury myself in my work. I do not think the road to contentment lies in despising what we have not got. Let us acknowledge all good, all delight that the world holds, and be content without it."

MacDonald is talking about envy of others' wealth, but the principle remains the same. I don’t know if, in his own life, MacDonald followed his own advice. It's noble, and something to aspire to, but tough to put into practice on a night when we know full well that there are still adventures to be had.

Poem for the day

The Farmer's Bride, by Charlotte Mew. I heard it read once, and it really struck me -- a veritable stew of love, longing, dangerous, unthinking passion, fear, pity. It's terrifying, and strangely beautiful, all at once.

Read more by Charlotte Mew (it's worth it) here.