Anna Traverse, Cameron Fogle, and Dido at Rhodes College.
The air was cool and silvery as silk on a recent springtime Sunday as the sun’s rays began to tilt toward dusk. The weekend had been full to overflowing: chores and errands, walks and dog-romps, the competing urges to rest and to slash items off the to-do list. Now, as Monday crept ever-closer, we put aside the list and set out on an adventure.
The day in question was the eighth anniversary of the day my now-husband, Cameron, and I met for the first time. It was also — the universe insists on poetic meter — my father’s 70th birthday, though he’s been gone six years now. We set off, along with the puppy (she’s almost one-and-a-half now; still a puppy), for a little casual time travel.
This late spring and early summer, I recommend finding a day or a moment to spend finding your own eternity. Invite your dog to join you, and maybe a favorite human, too, to slow down time alongside.
First, we visited the site of that first meeting, which happened to be Café Eclectic, on McLean Blvd. in Midtown. Eight years ago, we talked so long in a booth there that we failed to order anything but tea and ice water, and the poor waitstaff mopped around our feet until we finally left. We’ve stopped by pretty much every April 19 since, as a matter of tradition; I’m not saying it’s more important to us than our actual wedding anniversary, but I’m not not saying that, either.
OCTOBER 1992
Then it was Dido the puppy’s walk-time, so we wandered with her — sniffing and snootling this new-to-her neighborhood — up Tutwiler toward Rhodes College. My mother was an English professor there, specializing in Shakespeare, from 1985 until she died in 2005, at only 51. For a short while, before he became a teacher, my dad had a job there, too.
And for so many years it felt like forever — so routinely it felt like every day — the three of us would take our family dogs to campus in the late afternoons. We would throw Frisbees and tennis balls, scavenged from around the courts, on the back forty, or walk through the formal gardens and the rows of oaks closer to North Parkway. Those hours felt like oases. After a stressful day of 5th grade (remember how stressful 5th grade could be?) and an overlong faculty meeting, simply darting across a green expanse with a happy dog was a balm.
photograph by cynthia marshall
Anna with her father, John Traverse, at Rhodes College.
Nowadays, with no official affiliation to the college, we explained our reason for visiting and furnished our driver’s licenses before being granted access to the campus. Once inside, I was struck, as I always am, by how deeply, immediately familiar the walkways and sandstone edifices remain. I swear the place smells the same, after all these years, after so much change, so many new buildings erected, so many faces gone and come.
Most of all, I was struck by how time that afternoon seemed to pause and crystallize. Eight years vaporized before us, at the coffee shop — then on campus, twenty, thirty years floated into the oaks’ canopy. William Blake wrote, “To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour.” Stopping time is not a magic trick; it’s an everyday option.
Eternity’s a state of mind, I think. I’ve ventured on plenty of out-of-town trips that have left me feeling more depleted and less refreshed than an hour’s walk and a moment’s reflection. This late spring and early summer, I recommend finding a day or a moment to spend finding your own eternity, perhaps on a wooded path or in a haunted waterway. Invite your dog to join you, and maybe a favorite human, too, to slow down time alongside. Mondays will arrive more gently if your Sundays contain a little infinity.
