It being October, perhaps a cozy little story with a frisson of strangeness will be in order.
A Place Off Lake Shore Drive
Part 1
The Cliff Dwellers! Really? Why, congratulations, that’s quite an honor. –Well, that would be most kind of you, of course. But don’t be hasty with something like that. Even if there is not a requirement that you be a member for some length of time, I don’t think it would be considered polite to invite someone else right away. I do thank you for thinking of it, I’m most gratified; keep the thought in mind for a year or two, would be my suggestion. Yes, I did once ask about joining, when I was young and knew no better; they were in their old quarters then, over Orchestra Hall; many years ago. I was politely told that a member would have to invite me—as obviously you know. Small chance of that, back then, and after that I put the notion out of my mind. Imagine belonging to a club of all things, anyway, in the 1970s.
And yet, before too many months had passed, fortune took one of those odd turns.
About the time I made my naïve overture to the Cliff Dwellers, the fancy took me to go to graduate school. I told you once about the two professors I fell in with, and the very odd Ph.D. program they cobbled together for me. More than once I reflected on my prospects with such a strange degree and wondered if I’d gone insane. But as things have turned out, I’ve had no cause for complaint. As they assured me. One of them smoked a pipe, with a peculiar acrid tobacco—I can still remember the white tins stacked on a shelf behind his desk—that I’m told is no longer made. I wonder what he smokes now, if he … ah, but I digress.
There were books I needed for my research that couldn’t always be found in libraries, even the great old collections. I found that one particular used-book store seemed, somehow, to have the things I needed, sometimes before I knew I would need them. “The Alkahest” it was called. Long gone, long gone, like so many other things. I don’t know who owned it, exactly; there were three or four people who seemed to take turns minding the place. A man a little older than I, with wire-rimmed glasses, extravagant bell-bottoms, and a great bushy beard; a gaunt middle-aged man who always wore black; those I remember; and a woman who must have been sixty or seventy, who wore long dark dresses and called me “Professor”; for some reason I thought of her as French, though if she had an accent it was not much of one. Might have been from Minnesota, for all I know. But to her I owe … well, this story, for one thing.
To be continued ...
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