Met a girl from Richmond, Virginia yesterday out here in San Fran. Richmond is where i went to art and religion school and lived in an art community for ten years, with an old magical polish Jew from Argentina!
What a languid literary river city, with buried trains beneath churched hills, and bakeries where everyone remembers you, and porches fanning out across the fan. I lived on Grace Avenue. Some part of me, still does probably. So many artist friends still there, painting, sculpting and thinking about their spiritualities.
And lovely water barns outside of town, along the James river, which many poets have sung about starting with Edgar Alan Poe, whose house i lived near. I always said I’d write a book called Richmond which would be a biography of her long life before she was America. Maybe i still will. Lovely place, nice to meet one of her daughters yesterday. So lovely, like that ghosted city.
This new friend is going back to open a bakery and coffee house with her boyfriend. I hope they make it back, and keep making bread and coffee for that creative haven city! Even though all the statues along Monument avenue have been torn down now, and memory dislodged. I bet Grace Avenue is still there! Grace tends to be tenacious, as I’ve learned.
I come from storied cities, which are still silently singing in watery ways, less obviously branded than many. More like a river song at night, in honey suckle scent, or an old magnolia tree in Spring, Richmond is.
I’ve lived in lots of river cities, Austin, Boston (which the charles makes feel like a river city, at least in Cambridge), Albuquerque, Prague-all those cities had that mystery of the river in them. But Richmond may be my favorite in terms of the mystery of the river at night. I dream there often.
Nice to meet a daughter of Richmond in dusk’s light yesterday again. Cities are like new and old friends to me. They keep the story flowing…I don’t know which one I’ll end in, but I’m sure I’m walking towards another rivered city above somehow already.