Life was funny, growing up around characters but not inside a story. I’m not complaining; it was simply true that stories happened in New York or in California, on the shores of Earthsea or the plains of Krull, but never in central New Jersey. We didn’t have major radio or TV stations, so the news showed us Brooklyn and the movies showed us suburban Chicago, and I think we knew the wider world better than our own. Later, expat filmmakers flirted with caricature or danced around the edges of the odd, and sometimes a novelist knew the state well, but most wrote New Jerseys that didn’t ring true.

I mean, I didn’t find it strange that we rode sleds into traffic, that my friends stole software from Finland, that our principal hijacked a bus so fourth-graders could see Ronald Reagan, that escaped mental patients slept on our lawn, that we buried our dead in coffins stuffed with beer cans, that the girl next door walked a rabbit on a leash, that my uncle kept sheep in his suburban backyard (and wrapped the old ewe’s legs in duct tape to keep her from falling over)—but I knew these lives weren’t fit for proper fiction.

Then along came The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the story of a Dominican-American misfit who’s too obsessed with science fiction and fantasy to realize he’s living in a magical-realist novel. Readers love the geeky obsessions of Oscar de León, and Junot Díaz’s take on Dominican history is vital to his story, but I was drawn to the book by something else: Díaz went to Rutgers and Kean, and Oscar Wao is very Central Jersey.

At first I thought he’d whiffed it. Díaz names New Brunswick streets but barely shows or describes them. He mentions Amboy Cinemas, but the adventure of seeing movies there is a tale he doesn’t tell. He knows the late-’80s “nerd circuit” at Woodbridge Center (comic shop, gaming shop, Waldenbooks), but he won’t stop to linger and make the place real.

Then a landmark looms from the pages:

What he did was this: drank a third bottle of Cisco and then walked unsteadily down to the New Brunswick train station. With its crumbling facade and a long curve of track that shoots high over the Raritan. Even in the middle of the night, doesn’t take much to get into the station or to walk out onto the tracks, which is exactly what he did. Stumbled out toward the river, toward Route 18. New Brunswick falling away beneath him until he was seventy-seven feet in the air. Seventy-seven feet precisely. From what he would later recall, he stood on that bridge for a good long time. Watching the streaking lights of the traffic below. Reviewing his miserable life. Wishing he’d been born in a different body. Regretting all the books he would never write. Maybe trying to get himself to reconsider. And then the 4:12 express to Washington blew in the distance. By then he was barely able to stand. Closed his eyes (or maybe he didn’t) and when he opened them there was something straight out of Ursula Le Guin standing by his side…

I’ve been to the top of that train bridge—not for the same reason as Oscar, but compelled, as he was, by something other than reason. How did no one notice a teenage, microscopic me scaling a scrubby slope along a highway? For years I was sure I was all on my own—but then I learned that in the 1930s, the cops caught my grandfather trying to cut an hour off his commute by using that same viaduct as his personal footbridge. That was a very Junot Díaz discovery: places run in families.

It’s not a bad bridge to have climbed at least once. Glance down, and you will get dizzy; a train flies past and blows you to the edge, and you wince through a hideous gust. But when calm settles in and the tracks are all clear, there are weird sights to see up there, stories to spot, if you just know the right way to look.

(Photo © Gerald Oliveto. Used with permission.)

Fleeing a hot, crowded brownstone, Tom built his life on a dead-end lane: some trees, a brook, and extra land to parcel out to kids. For decades, he made the commute to the city, but most of his relatives followed him home. They were charmed by the place where he chose to raise chickens, plant string beans, and tinker with gadgets in peace.

The Piscataway soil will never be known for producing fine wines, but the tangle of vines on the side of the house was Tom’s own little piece of Provence. On the morning he never grew tired of griping about, he was tending his few feeble grapes. The sun was high, and the only sounds were birds and barking dogs. Perhaps he stopped to wipe his brow; he surely sneaked a sip of beer and dreamed about the homemade wine to come. Then a stranger slipped into the garden.

Dapper but fat, the stranger was speckled with dust from the road. He fanned his spiny jowls with his hat, introduced himself without a handshake, and eyed the gawky farmer. Uncreative, as all of them are, he asked about the clump of vines. He expressed delight, this bringer of mighty compliments, for who was nearer to God, and who better understood the common good, than a man who coaxed life from the earth?

The vines gave the stranger a sudden idea: He knew a nearby farmer whose cows were a sight to behold. Their output, he said, was impressive—no, not impressive: magical. This farmer had worked miracles with manure, and the kicker was, he always had a little dung to spare. Picture it: these grapes here growing and thriving, while neighbors and family toasted to each other’s health with the sweetest wine in town. A diligent public servant, he said, might easily procure a bag of this miracle fertilizer and bestow it upon a neighbor in need. Delivery would be quick, and it wouldn’t cost a penny—as long as that public servant knew he could count on a vote or two come November. Speaking of which, was the lady of the house at home?

The two men exchanged promises. Weeks passed, and then months. Only one man kept his promise. Tom remembered; fifty years later, it still made him angry.

By the time we were children, the suburbs had grown up around us, and Chaucerian frauds were sprouting like mushrooms: Combed-over charlatans who failed to hide their disdain as they loped up our porch steps to beg for support. The part-time mayor who never had time for parades or graduations. The priest who crept through the halls at the old folks’ home, buying cheap votes for his patron by handing out kitchen sponges. The sheriff’s sergeant who stole from the pension fund. Judges who snorted cocaine with their staff. Real-estate developers who hand-fed their pet creatures from town hall to Trenton. We were taught to laugh at them; only as an adult did I learn that “freeloader” was not, in fact, a valid civic office.

But sometimes, on a Tuesday, the grown-ups gathered at the kitchen table and unfolded an arcane sheet filled with drawings of dozens of levers. They studied it, they agreed on a time, and then, dressed as if going to church, they herded us into the Pinto. Sometimes we did go to a church; often we drove to a school, or to a building on the nearby college campus. Old ladies waited in line, as somber as schoolgirls in black-and-white photos, and old men talked in tones we never heard around the house. No one introduced us to any adults—we were small, badly dressed, and invisible—but we knew to behave while our elders, one by one, stepped behind a curtain. When they emerged, looking mostly unchanged, we all drove home, with no speeches about privileges or duties. The whole of the ritual spoke for itself.

The earth never shook, and our street still went unnoticed, and nobody told me which outcome was worse: the leader who promised a sack full of crap or the leader who failed to provide it. But we learned to detect its distinctive bouquet, that whiff of impending election. My grandfather taught me the grown-up response: get up, and go, and vote—but hold your nose.

If you’re a bookish sort, and if you find yourself near Philadelphia this Saturday, be sure to swing by the Collingswood Book Festival. The good people of Collingswood, N.J., work all year to put together a terrific day that includes six blocks of author talks, writing workshops, children’s programs, and booths for local writers, booksellers, and artists—and all events are free.

I spoke at Collingswood last year and had a great time. (A memorable time, too: I had to follow sports legend Pat Croce and compete with an Elvis impersonator down the block.) This year, keep an eye out for Steven Hart, a friend of this blog and, more importantly, the author of The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America’s First Superhighway. Steven has written a fine book, but don’t take my word for it; check out the effusive praise it’s recieved. When you buy the book at the festival, ask Steven for the “Quid Plura?” discount. He’ll give you a confused look, but don’t be fooled; that’s how New Jersey authors always look…

Growing up in Central Jersey, I never thought to pause and ponder quasi-medieval statuary, mostly because we didn’t have any—or so I thought until this weekend, when I drove through Bound Brook and decided, on a whim, to check out a monument that’s landed in my peripheral vision on and off for more than 20 years.

That’s St. Olga, seated in majesty. Behind her is a memorial church for the victims of Stalin’s famines; behind that is a lovely, tree-lined cemetery; and the entire area is part of the larger headquarters of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA, otherwise known as the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.

So who was St. Olga? Before her death in A.D. 969, Olga was the first ruler of the Rus to convert to Orthodox Christianity. Baptized in Constantinople, she ruled Kiev on behalf of her son and sent an embassy westward to Emperor Otto I. She was the grandmother of Prince Volodymyr—Vladimir—who proclaimed Orthodox Christianity the official religion of Rus-Ukraine. You know those emissaries who came back from Constantinople and famously said of Hagia Sofia, “We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth”? Those were Vladimir’s men.

Olga was not a nice lady. True to her Viking roots, she avenged her husband by burying his killers alive in a ship. She also sent smoldering doves to alight on the thatched roofs of an enemy town, which then burned down.

In Bound Brook, sculptor Petro Kapschutschenko has made a remarkable monument to the Kievan Rus regent. Olga is elevated, as an enthroned Byzantine empress would have been, reminding visitors of her superiority and making it impossible for anyone to look her in the eye. Viewed straight on, Olga seems remote but amused, as if she just condemned the director of a TaTu video—but in profile, her face is a mixture of dignity and visible cruelty.

Next to the church is another striking Kapschutschenko sculpture of a 20th-century archbishop raising his hand heavenward. Also on the grounds are the home and resting place of the local Dutch Reformed dignitary who witnessed the signing of the Declaration of Independence and then returned home to read it aloud to the people of Bound Brook.

But there, reigning at the gates, is Olga. As she deigns to rest her royal gaze on the run-down repair shop across the street, she’s a reminder of the Vikings who lent their name to Russia—and one reason why Russia, a thousand years later, still glares possessively at the Ukraine.

[Last year, when this blog was new and its readership was still rather small, I posted a story about the Twin Towers during better days. Here it is again, a small tribute to the connections we make with mere buildings.]

He told us about it our entire lives: the Hudson Toimnal, big as a city, born in Manhattan a year before he was. He could glimpse it by chance from his Gammontown stoop, or he could sneak to the rooftop for a better view, peering over three storeys of sooty clotheslines at the peaks of its twin towers. He later spent a decade there, twenty-six storeys up, crawling on beams over deep black shafts as he kept the elevators running.

“That was some building,” he’d say, wiring up a toaster at the kitchen table, cracking a dead can opener in two. “They don’t make ‘em like that no more.”

Shuffling to the cellar to study his switches and knobs, he hummed old songs through the few teeth left in his head. We heard the clack of the latch as he passed through the double doors, twin relics of his long-gone career. They were part of a Hudson Toimnal phone booth; he had hauled them home on a commuter train long before the towers came down.

He showed us his past in one fading brown snapshot: It’s 1934, and a skinny mechanic swings from rope-and-rag stirrups; he’s painting the northmost flagpole, a massive “U D S” behind him in awesome reverse. He’s only 25, but his smile says he’s the happiest man in Manhattan, with good reason: He’s hundreds of feet above the busy sidewalks, earning a rare day off from the best job he’ll ever have.

Sixty years later, the man in that photo surprised me. For all his talk about the Hudson Toimnal, he never expressed much interest in seeing its replacement—until one autumn morning, when he said that we should go.

As skyscrapers loomed over the deck of the ferry, I wondered what was happening at work.

“In them days,” he told me, “you wouldn’t dare take a day off. You take too many, they figured they could do without you.”

At the Battery, he gave a punk a cigarette and stared at the piers in confusion. “I don’t recognize none of this,” he insisted, but I pushed him through crowds of commuters and straight into the tourists. They were waiting to take the same elevator we were.

“I sure hope the cable doesn’t snap,” some jerk said, earning rueful snickers on the long ride up.

“Cables don’t break,” came the quiet rebuttal after we reached the top, “but if they do, the brake jaws grab the guide rails. That keeps the car from falling.” He was at home here, and still on the job.

But when we took the final escalator to the observation deck, he was silent for far too long. He studied the skyline. We were now a thousand feet higher than the flagpoles he had painted; all of it had changed.

Sad and lost, he shuffled his way to the western side. There he stopped, and began scanning for landmarks across the river—until, amazed to have sighted a familiar face, he rushed to a viewfinder, stuck in a quarter, and spun it straight toward the street where his childhood was.

He talked for weeks about what he’d beheld. “I thought the Hudson Toimnal Building was something,” he said. “But them Twin Towers…”

We heard less about the Hudson Toimnal Building after that, and for a while I forgot about the fading old photo. Five years later, I saw it again, in an envelope he left with my name on it.

Today, I keep it with a snapshot of my own: An old man visits a famous building that stands on top of his past. His hands grip the railing, as if a good gust might blow him away—but then he smiles, turns his ballcap backwards, and peers through the viewer, squinting to see where he’s been.

Thanks for stopping by the site, despite its dormancy. For a few days, I skipped town to sojourn in the glorious motherland (New Jersey), where I gave up books, the Internet, and medievalism in exchange for adventures with family and friends.

But during vacations, the past stays in sight; you just have to find the right angle. Behold: the main intersection of New Brunswick, New Jersey, sometime before 1940.

Subjected to urban churn, New Brunswick has been continuously redeveloped, with entire blocks giving way to newer, larger buildings. Today, if your ultimate goal is to picture the past, the view from above is perplexing.

But float to the ground, and in just a few seconds…

…you’re 89 years in the past.

The van comes swerving toward me but misses the curb. The driver hits his horn, as if I hadn’t seen him—but where he’s from, they do things loud that way.

Squirrels scatter. Maintenance men stare. The wife rolls down her window and holds up a map. The husband leans across her lap to bark at me.

“Sir you know how t’gedteither of thesotels?”

I want to laugh at the sir. It’s not the gentle nicety of the Virginian, but the pained formality of a traveler in a foreign land. His question collapses by the end, but he doesn’t mean it to; he bites each word as it falls from his mouth, and he just gulps down too much.

“Watch wanna do is,” I begin, and then I poin him and his wife back thway they came, and tellm to make the firs right, and go awlway down, south on Cneticit, and make thright on Calvert—kyean missit.

“Jus likon’ map,” says the wife, enlightened.

“Jus likon’ map,” I agree.

No smiles, no thanks, not even eye contact—he’s on a mission, and his missions long ago became her missions—and the van spins around. They roll up their windows and roll down the street. Squinting at their license plate, I smile to see I was right.

You can’t go home; after a while, it’s foolish to try. But sometimes, if you’re lucky, you receive a surprise, something worth more than a picture: the old sownds of home awl come cawlin f’you.

Congrats to Jen A. Miller, whose guide to the Jersey Shore was published ahead of schedule. Jen is asking readers to share their Jersey Shore memories. Here’s one from a few years back.

* * *

At a counter down the shore, three adults debate the necessity of fluff.

On fries? Stuff dries like Elmer’s Glue, for cryin’ out loud. We don’t need it, not if they put it on top—

“Comes onna side,” mutters Lex Luthor, who gives us no choice. So we partake of the fluff, though it’s more than we need, and we continue to eat our way along the boardwalk. The rides are rolling, the rigged wheels are whirling, and strangely shaped people waddle past with pizza. Somewhere behind them is the ocean.

“Funny how little it changes,” says dad, getting philosophical. “Kids come here to goof around, and then they bring their own kids. It’s been that way for a hundred years.”

We browse: bandannas, frilly shirts, switchblade combs, and bowls of seashells shrink-wrapped for the shameless and the lazy. Everything reeks of sea salt and grease. Later, so will we, even when we’re hours away.

“If we bring your nephew up to visit,” mom says from behind her ice cream cone, “we’ll come here. They don’t have this in Louisiana.”

They sure don’t. I’ll show the boy his heritage: the tiki bar where his mom hung out and the skee-ball arcades where her boyfriends won a menagerie of stuffed animals, if not her heart. We’ll feed him real pizza and other native delicacies to teach the kid just why his uncle can stay here, scavenging like a seagull, watching metalheads-turned-family-men wander by, listening as old, familiar vowels rise and fall. Then maybe he’ll see what our home state can give him: his own rightful portion of fluff.

You’re not supposed to love a chain store—but in the autumn of 1992, no one had ever told me that. Earlier that year, sophisticated friends had taken me to the Strand in New York and Shakespeare & Company in Paris, and I marveled at what I beheld. Outside of libraries, I had never seen so many books, and I crept through the aisles with palpable glee. Even so, when they told me that both sites were cultural landmarks, I didn’t know how to respond. Although my purchases should have proven otherwise, those great, sprawling bookstores just didn’t exist. Like museums and cathedrals, they were mirages we gawked at on brief urban field trips; there’s no way such places were real.

That winter, I came home from college, and soon heard that people were talking: they’d put a new bookstore out on Route 18, and everyone said it was huge. Skeptical, I headed for the highway, expecting another mall store, some glorified hallway with only the latest bestsellers; but at the end of a half-dead strip-mall, less than a mile from the local landfill, in front of a parking lot pitted with potholes and crags, was an oasis I’d never imagined.

Tables by subject, comfortable seating, intimate aisles with rich wooden shelves—I was overwhelmed. My small college town offered nothing like this, and I was doubly amazed to discover a “medieval studies” section, several shelves of books that I simply hadn’t known I could own. In the months that followed, I often returned, making many impulse purchases—The Kalevala, Njal’s Saga, The Poetic Edda, the works of Sir Thomas Malory—without foreseeing that one day I’d be teaching most of these books, sharing them with students who otherwise wouldn’t have known them.

I also didn’t foresee that after fifteen years, this bookstore, destined to be dubbed “underperforming,” would quietly go out of business.

On Sunday, shoppers lamented the store’s final week. “I’m so sorry you’re closing,” wailed one woman, accosting a startled clerk. “It’s going to kill me!” As I wandered the aisles the very last time, I was hardly as histrionic, because I couldn’t help noticing that where once there were no mega-bookstores within half an hour of where I grew up, now there are nearly twenty. The closing of one store may be worthy of wistfulness, but in our era of Amazon.com and convenient, coffee-mad superstores, the idea that such places can “underperform” should be cause for a satisfied smile.

We’re spoiled; we quickly forgot that on the eve of the invention of the first Web browser, a Borders store was such a big deal that we dragged out-of-towners to see it. Those big-city bookstores were somebody else’s; this box, full of futures, was ours.

This post has nothing to do with the Middle Ages, but I hope my regular readers will indulge me as I join CNN in celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64. So many readers responded to their story that the network published a follow-up article full of fond remembrances from the era of frizzy hair and stonewashed denim jackets.

I’m amused, but hardly surprised, to see that many of those readers cite the C-64 as their initiation into the life of the techie. Most of my computer-owning friends did go on to prosper as engineers and programmers, but let me raise a minority voice: for some of us, that computer was also our gateway to the humanities.

Oh, it would be easy for me to cite the influence of computerized fantasy games, or the ways that programming made me appreciate the versatile applications of symbolic logic, or the software-pirate friend whose excursions into international trade prompted me to find out exactly where Finland was on a map. No, much more important was the fact that with the addition of a simple $60 cartridge, that ugly brown machine whisked us into an entirely new dimension nearly a decade before the rest of the world discovered it: an online cosmos of discussion and debate.

Today, most of my old techie friends are sharper, livelier writers than many of the humanities types I meet. I don’t wonder why. Logged into single-line bulletin boards, reveling in a crudeness I’m glad the world has forgotten, we learned how to craft an argument for a particular audience; we discovered, through trial and error, the tricks of persuasive writing; and we learned, eventually, the art of conveying tone. All of this experimentation occurred in one of the few non-academic environments that encouraged our flailing attempts at coherent, articulate writing, an entirely online milieu that would later take the rest of the world by surprise—and which most of us never imagined would someday go mainstream.

In the past decade, I’ve kept a roof over my head by cranking out a million words of uncredited copy. Freelance gigs have given me an excuse to romp across England and Wales; subsequent paychecks have funded adventures in the Balkans and South Korea. Five feet from where I’m typing this, a carton of trade paperbacks with my name on each cover amuses me to no end, because I know there’d be no little Charlemagne book had I not owned that dumpy computer.

Twenty-five years later, my programming skills, which were never formidable, are finally rusted and gone. Other people troubleshoot my technical problems, and I consider it a triumph when I fiddle with blog templates and manage not to break anything. By contrast, most of my fellow Commodore owners pursued careers that capitalized on those early encounters with personal computers. They stayed current; I spun off in a wildly different direction. Regardless, I’m pleased to claim at least honorary membership in the online generation falsely accused of “changing the positions of satellites up in the blue heavens”—even if all I did on my home computer was simply learn how to write.