Asking for Directions
by Linda Gregg

We could have been mistaken for a married couple
riding on the train from Manhattan to Chicago
that last time we were together. I remember
looking out the window and praising the beauty
of the ordinary: the in-between places, the world
with its back turned to us, the small neglected
stations of our history. I slept across your
chest and stomach without asking permission
because they were the last hours. There was
a smell to the sheepskin lining of your new
Chinese vest that I didn't recognize. I felt
it deliberately. I woke early and asked you
to come with me for coffee. You said, sleep more,
and I said we only had one hour and you came.
We didn't say much after that. In the station,
you took your things and handed me the vest,
then left as we had planned. So you would have
ten minutes to meet your family and leave.
I stood by the seat dazed by exhaustion
and the absoluteness of the end, so still I was
aware of myself breathing. I put on the vest
and my coat, got my bag and, turning, saw you
through the dirty window standing outside looking
up at me. We looked at each other without any
expression at all. Invisible, unnoticed, still.
That moment is what I will tell of as proof
that you loved me permanently. After that I was
a woman alone carrying her bag, asking a worker
which direction to walk to find a taxi.


Linda Gregg, “Asking for Directions” from All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1994 by Linda Gregg. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org. (buy now)

It's the birthday of the 28th president, Woodrow Wilson, born in Staunton, Virginia (1856). He started his career as a professor, became governor of New Jersey, and then president.  He said, "A conservative is a man who sits and thinks, mostly sits," and "If you want to make enemies, try to change something."

It's the birthday of the man who said “Lead us not into temptation. Just tell us where it is; we'll find it.” That’s writer and comedian Sam Levenson (books by this author), born 110 years ago today in New York City (1911). He grew up in a Jewish section of Brooklyn and later said, “It was on my fifth birthday that Papa put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Remember, my son, if you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm.’”

He taught Spanish in New York public schools through out his 20s, and then one day some of his fellow teachers who’d formed an orchestra asked him to MC their concert at a hotel in the Catskills. He loved it. He started performing at comedy clubs, where he’d tell funny stories about growing up in New York City. Pretty soon he was a regular guest on the Ed Sullivan show and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. He even was given his own TV show, but in the end he decided that he preferred to write books. His books include Sex and the Single Child (1969), In One Era And Out The Other (1973), You Can Say That Again, Sam! (1975), and Everything But Money (1966).

He once said, “It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and say the opposite,” and he said “The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy.”

It was on this day in 1065 that Westminster Abbey was consecrated. It was the project of King Edward the Confessor, but Edward himself was sick on this day and couldn't come to the ceremony and died a few days later. The next year William the Conqueror was crowned in the Abbey, a tradition that has continued to this day with a few exceptions.

One section of Westminster Abbey is known as the Poets' Corner. The first poet buried there was Geoffrey Chaucer in 1400 and he was actually buried there because he had an administrative position with Westminster and lived right by the Abbey, not because he was a writer. But in 1599 Edmund Spenser was buried near Chaucer and, after that, it was considered a place for writers. Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Rudyard Kipling, and many more are buried there.

Ben Jonson (books by this author), Shakespeare's contemporary, probably has the most famous epitaph in the Abbey: "Oh rare Ben Jonson." He was buried in Westminster, but not in Poets' Corner, and he is the only person buried there ever to be buried standing upright. One story goes that the Dean of Westminster talked to Jonson about the possibility of being buried in Poets' Corner, and Jonson replied, "I am too poor for that, and no one will lay out funeral charges upon me. No, sir, six feet long by two feet wide is too much for me; two feet by two will do for all I want," and the Dean promised he could have it. Whatever the reason, when he died in poverty in 1637 he was definitely buried upright, as some workers found out in 1849 when they accidentally dislodged his burial spot and his skull, with some red hair attached, rolled down from a spot above his leg bones.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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