Was 189 years ago today that Walt Whitman was born across the One-Ten from the Walt Whitman Mall. When Ken, my college roommate who grew up on Long Island and near the mall, first told me there was a Walt Whitman Mall, I was stunned. At first, not knowing the birthplace was so near, I simply thought "How wonderful that a mall would carry the name of such a great."
My second thought could have been "how demeaning, how commercial," and yet Walt would have liked it. He would have lamented the loss of the rolling hills and thick forests that surrounded the modest homestead, but would have reveled in the humanity of the new 20th century main street that the mall gave Americans. He would have visited, might have shopped with Pete Doyle, probably for hats or maybe a new pen. Although, he would most likely just sit on a bench, watch the people parade until some slouching security guard would have asked him to move along if he were not going to buy something.
I visited the birthplace farm once, walked the yard bordered by rail fences, stood under the low ceilings of the second floor rooms and listened for that first cry, that first song of himself.
I think Walt would have giggled at the way the One-Ten (also called Walt Whitman Road) to the west and New York Avenue to the east wrap the mall and its immense parking lots in a oval that is so feminine Georgia O'Keeffe would have wanted to paint it from 10,000 feet. Maybe he has shown it to her as they stroll the heavens.
Walt's words were part of the fuel for my revolution of the soul, part of the trinity which included Emerson and Thoreau. Years later when I met the love of my life and learned her middle name was Whitman and that she grew up less than a half dozen miles from Walt's home, it added another flavor to my admiration. So of course there was no debate when she wanted to pass the name along to our first born.
This morning while turning through an ancient textbook, the pages being where I first met Walt's words, I saw lines from Song of Myself, circled in red with a simple one-word marginal note in my earlier life handwriting: Fantastic!
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning
and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Thanks Walt......!
