When The Moon Sings - July 12, 2025

After the sun has breached the horizon for about an hour, he pads into my office, the resident dog.  He fixes me with a steady eye, interrupted only by a yawn or two.  If I do not respond, he pokes his paw into my leg.  It is dog time.  We will wander around the neighborhood until he is empty, too hot, or both, and flee inside the house while the temperature and the humidity fight each other for the highest grade for the rest of the day.

Puppies want to meet everyone, but more mature dogs usually take a different approach.  My veteran housemate has no objection to meeting others, but his main interest seems to be discovering where other have been previously.  He snuffles along the grass edge, apparently attempting to divine who has been there and when.  When he finds a smell of interest, he leaves a calling card of his own and we continue on our way.

Sweep this away as a peculiar oddity of dogs if you must, but like so much else involving dogs, humans behave similarly.  The details of previous lives fascinate us, and given a suitable site, we may imagine we can feel some of what the historical residents did.  That feeling becomes intense when great events occurred in that place.

Sometimes, it requires great imagination to feed the feeling.  Much of a lifetime ago, the beta version of me toured the Freedom Trail in Boston.  The mid-to-late twentieth century edition of the trail bore little resemblance to the pre-revolutionary settlement.  The Old North Church, where the lanterns triggered Paul Revere on his famous ride, had changed dramatically.  Had Revere set out in the time I was there, his horse would have likely been pilfered before he lost sight of the lanterns.  The neighborhood was famous for disappearing automobiles.

Later versions of me stumbled around Civil War battlefields:  Antietam, Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, and Bull Run.  The land is mostly unimproved, much the way it was when those battles took place.  The only thing missing is upwards of one hundred thousand men trying to obliterate each other.  The land by itself is sterile, and the sterility becomes reinforced by battle maps, where tidy lines and arrows show the positions and movements of the troops.  The events themselves lacked that tidiness, and our impressions of them lack accuracy if all we see are arrows on a map.

I once lived on a battlefield of that sort, though much smaller.  Confederates had established a small trench system in the Virginia suburbs of DC, and Union commanders sent an overwhelming force to dislodge them.  The Confederates fired a few volleys and bowing to the inevitable, left the field for friendlier places west of the city.  We calculated that the line must have stretched from the bowling alley to the east parking lot of the high-rise complex.  It's harder to romanticize developed neighborhoods.

Cities, of course, have their own versions.  I have stood on ground that George Washington may have stood on too.  I have wandered down halls where great and good Americans did significant things, and also where their lesser fellows did reprehensible ones.  The halls and castles overseas provide the same type of experience.

This week, I began to study W. H. Auden’s poem September 1, 1939, for reasons that have nothing to do with radio.  He starts the poem with the lines: “I sit in one of the dives. On Fifty-Second Street Uncertain and afraid.”  Wait a minute – 52^nd Street?  I know a little about that place.  In Auden’s time, 52^nd Street was a place to go.  After Prohibition, music venues and jazz clubs moved into 52^nd Street in a big way.  Most if not all of the performers who entertained the nation played there, from the late 30’s to the early 60’s.  But music took a different direction, and the area subsided.  Now, it’s become a high business area – hotels and office buildings and everything a commercial traveler might need.  I’m not sure you could find a dive on 52^nd Street anymore – well, maybe in Hell’s Kitchen, over by the docks.  But there were plenty of them when I last visited.

In truth, any particular location on 52^nd Street has seen multiple events, perhaps starting as a slum overflow from Hell’s Kitchen.  Then through dives and stores that supported the surrounding neighborhoods, then the speakeasies of Prohibition, the jazz club era, the post jazz sag, and now hotel and corporation support.  But the same is true of any location, even non-urban ones.  The battlefield at Antietam was a perfectly pleasant farm community until it was bathed in blood, and the one at Gettysburg, an attractive set of meadows, fields and copses.  They might attract visitors even without the historical association.

The landscape, even with buildings on it, is innocent of human events, great and small.  A place where I once owned property had been a training camp during the Spanish-American War.  In that era, if you wanted to make yourself deathly ill with typhus, it was the place to be.  That era was long gone when I resided there.  Some history remains best forgotten.

My bucket list has become leaky, especially in regard to travel.  At one point, I travelled for business, to some places that people visit for their culture and history.  They saw castles, great paintings and sculpture, cathedrals, centuries-old streets and settlements.  I saw the same airports and lodgings as they did, but I spent the rest of my time in fluorescent-lit offices, dealing with people and equipment.  I’d still like to go back to some of them, but the list grows shorter as the years pass.  Paris, Rome, Phoenix, and San Francisco all have sights worth seeing, but dealing with those places and travel to them outweighs the attractions.  Cities, even great ones, have become more exhausting than their attractions.

The dog in his years prefers grassy verges and walks in the woods to asphalt and concrete, and the less travel to get to a shaded spot, the better.  I resonate with this bit of canine wisdom.  The peach orchard at Gettysburg and the Piper orchard at Antietam still attract me, not so much for what happened there, but for their current state of peace.