Driving from Sandy’s through heavy traffic ‘round the District I am more than ever grateful for Google assistance with navigation—certainly a godsend for a solo driver in a strange land.  In the late afternoon, I arrive in Narberth, a suburb of Philadelphia on the historic Pennsylvania Main Line with a population of 4,304, one of Philly’s most desirable neighborhoods, a cozy half square mile borough well known for a charming downtown, good schools, and low crime.  Niche, the website that rates schools, companies, and neighborhoods, gives Narberth an A+ rating.  And indeed, as I arrive on the Sunday before Memorial Day, the home I pull up to is a three-story Queen Anne in a neighborhood lifted straight out of Our Town. 

Connor, Barry and Ann’s son, is the first to see me and after introducing himself offers to carry my bags up the rather daunting three flights of steps to my guest room at the top of the house—a service for which I am VERY grateful.  Barry and Ann have just returned from visiting relatives in Barry’s native Ireland, and Barry is on the phone with his brother there when Ann greets me.  She and Barry are part of my Tulane grad school gang, and though both also got PhDs in English there, Barry went on to the Tulane Law School, and remains a professor at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law.  Ann also teaches at Temple, writing, literature, and most recently business ethics, and both spent several enjoyable years working in Tokyo, where Barry was Director of the Law Program at Temple University Japan.  We three met up for the first time in years in New York City in early April, saw the new Letts play, and had a long, lovely dinner of reminiscing after.  Now I’m taking them up on their invitation to make a visit at the end of my southern sojourn on my way back to New Hampshire.

The heat in Narberth is the reverse of what I’d expected:  it was actually cooler in usually steamy Greensboro, North Carolina than farther north, but I’m grateful for a reason to have the dinner Ann’s prepared out on the generous porch of an earlier era.

Indeed, our situation reminds me of evenings on the porch of my grandparents’ Tudor revival home on Springbrook Boulevard in Dayton, Ohio, where after dinner in summer the neighborhood kids would eventually drift home from pickup games of Red Rover on the front yard and settle onto their respective porches as the fireflies came out and some of the adults told stories while others enjoyed their evening smoke. 

Ann’s meal is delicious, crab cakes, rice, salad, and blonde brownies, and in the gloaming, in addition to grad school tales, Barry speaks of what the law can and can’t do (“There is no will that can’t be broken”) and how he makes good use of his legal and literary training, sometimes teaching poetry forensically, instructing students to look for evidence of what the poet was thinking.  I keep thinking of the old tv series Paper Chase, with patrician John Houseman as Professor Kingsfield intoning at each episode’s beginning:  “You teach yourselves the law, but I train your minds.  You come here with a skull full of MUSH, and—if you survive—you leave thinking like a lawyer.”  I doubt Barry intimidates the way Kingsfield did, but I’m sure his students DO learn to think better than they did before they took his class. 

Both Barry and Ann were sorry to leave Japan, I’m interested to learn, and plan to return in the fall of 2023.  We speak of another tv show I’ve stumbled onto, Old Enough, a long-running reality show from Japan that follows very young children going on errands all by themselves for the very first time as a camera crew follows along:  stunningly daring parental behavior it seems to me, not only not a helicopter parent, but never a parent at all.  Ann tells of her more careful hybrid American/Japanese parenting, shadowing Connor in a metro car behind the one he was riding, just to be sure all was well.

It is so good to re-connect with these admirable friends.  When they ask if my guest room is all right and I answer that it is not only fine, but strikes me as Parisian, the idea of comparing Narberth to Paris gets a big laugh. 

Yet when I retire to it, the impression of my room persists, and I drift off in my garret with its charming roof-top views from an earlier time:  all turrets and leafy green tree tops.