Time Machine

I’d need a time machine for some of the places that were favorite places They’ve drifted off in the tides of time. Here are two of them:

Rienzi’s on MacDougal Street

If you’ve read my blog for a bit, you might know about a place called the Cafe Rienzi. It was down in New York’s Greenwich Village, and was one of the frequent hangouts of luminaries like Jackson Pollock, Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac, and James Baldwin. But I never knew them. As a lowly aspiring folksinger, I was a habitue of the back room, what we called the music room. Between sets at other coffee houses. We’d meet kibbitz, play our latest tunes. The myth about the Rienzis was that you could sit in the front room and, if you were patient, anyone you needed to meet would eventually walk through the doors.

I eventually drifted away and years later when I returned the cafe was closed.

Lyons Street Ottawa, Ontario

In 1969, I departed in a Volkswagen bus for my final grand detour on the road. It covered swaths of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Midwest. Then it detoured into Canada. My girlfriend and I plotted a squiggly line all over Ontario and Quebec before deciding to go to Vancouver. I’d never crossed the continent across Canada, and Vancouver was someplace I had wanted to see. We never made it. We were returning to our campsite in Algonquin Provincial Park after a shopping trip for supplies. My girlfriend swerved to avoid a child in the road, and we crashed into a tree. We were OK, but the car had been totaled. Swerving the car was not an error. She acted on an instant to save a child’s life

We spent weeks living in our campsite waiting for the insurance claim to be settled. The occupants of the adjacent site, the Washingtons, were our mainstay during that period. Their good manners and aid to a distressed couple eventually matured into a friendship. When their vacation was over, it was suggested that we follow them to Ottawa. An apartment had opened up in their building, and we could rent it while we waited for the insurance to settle, which was going to be a long time.

It was a happy interlude. It was made even more enjoyable by the addition of a small ferocious gray kitten, Clancy J Bumps. Eventually, my girlfriend and I made our separate ways back to the States. Clancy had many adventures as the Grey Menace, an exceptional cat provocateur.

I have never been a global traveler; the USA, Canada, and some journeys in the Caribbean have been the extent of my wanderings. But I did what most tourists don’t. I settled and lived as a local in many places, and as a result, they forever have a claim on me and me on them. In a lot of cases, the physical locations exist. But the web of relationships, the spirit of the times, has disappeared. And that’s why I’d need a time machine to revisit them.