Holy Rover
I’ve been a-rovering again, doing research for Spiritual Travels and other publications while attending a meeting of the Midwest Travel Writers Association (MTWA) as well as Louisville’s Festival of Faiths. This trip may have set my personal record for widest range of experiences on a single trip: it included horse-racing, bourbon distilleries, a ghost tour of one of the most haunted places in America, Benedictine and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, and seeing the Dalai Lama in person.
But before telling you about those adventures I’m going to ease back into blogging by linking to a lovely essay written by my friend Rich Warren, a writer from Ohio. Rich was named the MTWA Travel Writer of the Year at our Louisville meeting. The award was given for work that included this essay about a literary pilgrimage to the sites associated with the author Eudora Welty
In 2001, my friends all thought I was mad when I drove 12 hours to Jackson, Mississippi, to attend the funeral of a 92-year-old Southern gentlelady.
But this wasn’t just any old lady. She was my hero.
I met Eudora Welty in college when she spent three days with us at the invitation of an organization of English majors I was part of. They were three days that changed my life. Although I never saw her again, I followed her closely, and I’d always longed to visit her in her home — to drop by for tea as so many of her devotees did, and which someone I met at a party had done. It never happened. But I always figured that someday I would overcome my anxieties and pay a call on her in her home.
When she passed away, my hopes were crushed. But recently, I managed to fulfill a life’s dream by stopping by Miss Welty’s home in Jackson, which is now open to the public and kept exactly as it was when she lived there. The atmosphere is so intensely personal you get the sense that she’s still there somewhere, perhaps out in the kitchen, fixing you her famous crabmeat casserole.
In April of 2009, Welty would have turned 100. But I met her during my senior year at Kent State when she was a spry 68, still in the prime of her writing career. My organization had resolved to bring a major writer to campus. We’d sent out invitations to all the big names, even Solzhenitsyn, whom we didn’t realize couldn’t speak English. We got nice refusals from John Updike and John Barth, a snippy “no” from Joyce Carol Oates. What stung us most was a letter from the campus programming board, who was funding us. They said we were aiming too high and suggested a number of “second-tier writers,” none of whom we’d ever heard of. It was looking bleak.
But then we heard from the resident of 1119 Pinehurst Street in Jackson, a long, gracious letter saying how charmed she’d been by our sincere request, that she’d love to spend time with us, but could we accommodate the rather narrow timeframe she had available? We’d have accommodated her at any hour of the day or night. We had landed Eudora Welty.
We were stunned — and starstruck — that we were about to host a woman some called the greatest living American writer. Yet she was hardly a household name — the question most frequently asked of us was “Eudora who?” But for us, she quickly evolved into our personal Superauthor. We pored over her work, and even before she arrived, we started affectionately calling her “Miss Eudora.”
We caravanned to the Cleveland airport to meet her. One of the two biographies written of her spends considerable space — unkindly — describing how homely she was. Still, it was possible within 30 seconds of meeting her to forget those surface things. Charming, self-effacing and with a mischievous wit, she was an absolute joy to be around. She hung on your every word and made life an adventure, a funny one. From the moment you met her, you never wanted to leave her side… [to read the rest of the essay, go to Literary Traveler]
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