I was in Boston in 1997, just out of grad school, with no book titles under my belt and little teaching experience. All I had was a terminal degree, which every Jack and Jill in the shared office for adjunct faculty seemed to have. I was, to put it another way, a nobody. I also had a dwindling bank account and a love for a quaint corner of the humanities that few people cared much about, a discipline whose proper place, I sometimes joked to myself, was probably in a museum.
Anyways, here I was, struggling, trying to maintain some dignity, both as a scholar and a family man. One day I would be an invisible adjunct at Emerson College on Beacon Street, another day another dispensable at Wentworth on Huntington Avenue. One fall term I taught at Suffolk University up on Beacon Hill, next to the famed Golden Dome, featured in that movie starring some Southies named Mark and Damon—or were they from Charlestown? In any case, that was the highlight of my illustrious first years as a philosopher: being on the Hill and so close to the Dome.
The family lived in Somerville at the time. On the days when I had class, I took the bus on Highland Avenue to Davis Square to catch the inbound Red Line downtown. On the very first morning I waited for the train, I noticed words engraved into the red bricks that paved the platform floor. I walked slowly up and down the platform, following the trail of words like a man who had just dropped a penny and was determined to find it again. Only it wasn’t pennies I was looking for. One word emerged, then another, one line, then another. Before long I realized I was reading a poem—or at least part of one.
I’m nobody; are you nobody too?
Then there’s a pair of us.
Hush! Or they’ll banish us, you know.
I was thrilled by the discovery, and moved by what the lines seemed to be saying. They stayed with me for years. But as far as that morning went, that was it. A good poem, I thought, and what a brilliant idea—to put it on the floor, so all these weary-looking people taking the T downtown every morning to pound the pavement somewhere else would have themselves to look at.
This went on for several years. Never once did I bother to ask what poem it was or who had written it. Perhaps I simply had too many other things on my mind—the class I was about to teach, my career, making ends meet. On many mornings I stood on that very platform with those engraved words under my feet and paid them no attention at all, just like most of the other passengers waiting for the same train.
My stint as an adjunct ended when I received a job offer from a university in Michigan. It still wasn’t tenure-track, but at least it was full-time, renewable, and came with the benefits of a regular faculty position. The downside was the location. It was a small town in the middle of nowhere. The nearest city was nearly an hour away. The isolation didn’t bother me much, but it certainly bothered many of my colleagues. Every summer, when I watched them hurry off to Boston or Europe the moment classes ended, I realized just how badly they wanted to escape this little college town surrounded by soybean fields.
Borders was still around then, and so was Barnes & Noble. Neither had a store in our town. The nearest Barnes & Noble was in Midland, about forty minutes away. On weekends, when everyone in the family felt like seeing even more soybean fields and even flatter land than we already lived in, we drove to Saginaw, a little farther east. The highway passed the state correctional facility, and every time we drove by it we became just a little more excited, as though we were entering criminal territory.
It was in the Barnes & Noble in Saginaw that I first came across the name Emily Dickinson.
Old habits die hard. Literature had once been where my heart was, especially during the last two years of college. By then it had receded into the background, pushed aside by work and career. But on that particular day, for reasons known only to God, I wandered into the literature section and found myself standing before shelves filled with authors I had once loved.
I saw Chekhov, so dear to me in my younger days. I saw Rilke, another old companion. I was tempted to pull one of them from the shelf, but resisted. I had the strange feeling that if I opened either book, a floodgate would give way, and all the dreams and passions I had carefully sealed away would come rushing back. Then it would be too late. I would no longer be able to focus on building the career I had worked so hard to begin.
The only exception was a small volume of Emily Dickinson. I gave myself permission to pick it up, precisely because I wasn’t familiar with her. She seemed harmless enough. A small black-and-white portrait of a woman in a plain dress stared quietly from the cover.
I opened the book.
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!
I was dumbstruck.
Those were the very lines I had read years earlier on the brick floor of the Davis Square station.
So this little woman from Amherst, Massachusetts, had been speaking to me all along.
Looking back now, I realize why those lines had moved me so deeply from the very beginning. At the time, I was a nobody in every ordinary sense of the word. And even after life gradually became kinder to me, I never found myself envying those who had become Somebodies. What Emily dreaded was also what I dreaded.
How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one’s name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!
For several years, first from Michigan and later from upstate New York, we made it a family tradition to spend a few days in Boston every summer. Every time we drove through the wooded hills of western Massachusetts and saw the highway sign for Amherst, Emily Dickinson would come back to me. Each time I thought of the day in the Saginaw Barnes & Noble when I bought that little volume of her poems. I thought of the lines engraved in the brick floor at Davis Square Station, where I waited for the inbound Red Line on my way to class. And I said to myself, I was fortunate. My life had been good. First I ran into Emily when I myself was nobody. Years later I met her again in a bookstore in Saginaw. And now, every time I pass Amherst, I feel as though I am passing through the country of an old friend.
Postscript
After writing the first draft of this essay, I discovered that the poem on the Davis Square platform had not reproduced Dickinson’s text exactly. The editors who first published her poems after her death had quietly changed “Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!” to “Hush! Or they’ll banish us, you know,” and that edited version was the one I unknowingly carried in my memory all these years.
Somehow, though, I like having first met Emily that way. We all meet writers through other people’s hands before we finally meet them in their own.
Yego’s Chronicles 