Bipedal Stories

I got off the 4 train at Kingsbridge Road. I ambled up the hill, away from the winter winds skating off the Harlem River. The sidewalks bustled. A linguistic mix of Spanish, English, and New York echoed off the grey-granite-faced buildings. A mother pushed a child in a stroller, led an older child home from grade school. A balding gent sold churros from a grocery cart.

I reached the Grand Concourse. A few blocks south, on a patch of green in the middle of the Concourse, was a small, white clapboard cottage. In 1846, Edgar Allan Poe and his wife Virginia moved to this workingman’s hovel in what was then the countryside. Virginia died in 1847. Poe remained in the cottage until his death in 1849. I toured Poe Cottage with a group that included a literature student from China and a Poe-obsessed father-daughter duo from Chicago.

The sun had poked through the baffle of heavy grey clouds. I walked south to Fordham Road, a bazaar of off-price clothing stores, cell-phone shops, and cash-for-gold. I turned west. There, set apart from neighborhood’s chaos of commerce, bus-lane congestion, and Manhattan-bound diesel-pumping truckers, was Fordham University.

I walked along the perimeter. At Bathgate Avenue (are you there E.L. Doctorow?), I doubled back and entered the campus through Fordham Avenue. The city receded. I followed a winding tree-lined path to the center of the campus. The Bronx was still out there, beyond Fordham’s gothic palisades of brick and stone. Inside was birdsong, contemplative quiet. A student reviewed her notes as she entered Walsh Library.

I followed the path to the northern edge of the campus. Across Southern Boulevard was the Bronx Botanical Gardens. I checked my watch. It was time to get going.