A new pilgrimage

April 17, 2008

Dear Pat,

Friends and I stayed at the Algonquin Hotel while visiting New York some years ago. We wanted to breathe the air where through the hyperbolic decade of the 1920s the Algonquin Round Table pumped new ideas into the American culture over lunch.

The Algonquin had an unwritten dress code. When we took tea and a waiter handed me a green dinner jacket that was three sizes too big, I did not say anything. Dorothy Parker and friends took care of that.

A Cape Girardeau nightclub posts its dress code on the windows out front. No jerseys, do-rags, hooded heads, pants below the waistline, no hats worn to the side (backwards or forwards are acceptable), no T-shirts worn below the crotch and no sweats. "In other words, dress nice," it means to say, excluding me from head to below the crotch.

I like pilgrimages. In the '80s I went to Asbury Park to see Bruce Springsteen's haunts. The Stone Pony, the nightclub he considered home, was closed at midday, but true meccas let pilgrims in whenever they arrive. New paint covering the latest wisdom in the bathroom did not hide the sweat and mojo of thousands of nights of rock 'n' roll.

The cops busted Madame Marie "for telling fortunes better than they did," Springsteen sang, but she was still on the boardwalk attired in gypsy regalia, selling futures and accustomed to answering questions about New Jersey's favorite son. "He was such a nice boy," she told me.

Being a pilgrim feels like following an ancient urge. The poet Stephen Spender writes of remembering the soul's history. "What is precious, is never to forget/The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs."

We seek out the path of those whose footsteps have guided our own in some way, if only to have made us wonder where they might lead.

I leave soon on another pilgrimage, this one to a destination much further away. Like all pilgrimages, it begins with the hope of encountering adventure and of experiencing for yourself something you've only been told about, rumors your soul has heard.

Something that could move you. To be moved is to be changed forever.

My first time in the West, the reality replaced my college fantasy of "California Dreamin'" and I thought, "Why didn't anybody tell me how magnificent it is out here?" The skies, the mountains, the trees, the rivers, the ocean looked like none I'd ever seen before. They were symphonic clashes of earth and water and air, all of spellbinding beauty.

My suspicion that this pilgrimage could offer experiences as foreign and enrapturing is tempered by a phrase I've read over and over in books about this place. "Expect the unexpected," they say, framing the words as neither warning nor enticement.

The first and most important step of every pilgrimage is the one out your own front door.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.