the international flying pedagogues

It's been in the neighborhood of 80 degrees for months and months and months. Even when it has begun to cool down at night, and when the widget weather says 71⁰, by the time you get into the exposed car in the afternoon it's well over 80. Rain is a stranger. Whether there was ever a spring I don't recall. So let's have a little winter story. Let's put on a black turtleneck, black pants, thick striped knee socks, black boots. Pack a four-day duffel the night before, because the valet arrives in the first blue feathers of dawn; the train leaves for Vancouver at 8am. Don't forget your passport.

Second week of January means time for the MLA conference, hosted this year in the northern city called Vancouver. Jessica and I will take our act international as I drag her down my Canadian memory lane. The weather will be milder than it was in Chicago last year, I will not drink red wine, I will not get violently ill, I will get serious and go to fascinating literary sessions all day long. But first, I will forget my passport.

I am made aware that I've forgotten it when we're in Jessica's driveway, 15 minutes from the train station. It will take three times that long to get there via returning to my house. But I can't board a train to Canada without my passport, so return we do. The highway is clogged with the morning commute so we exit. The main arterial is barricaded by cop cars. Walter and Jes attempt levity but I am inconsolably distressed, calling the Amtrak agent to hear what happens when you are ridiculous enough to miss your train. Get on at the next stop of course. So Walter, who rarely balks at a chance to save the day, calculates which of the next few stops we have the best chance of catching up to. He drives us an hour north and deposits us at the Mount Vernon station, which is nearly deserted.

Jessica is beginning to show her own signs of agitation as her phone buzzes with school district closure alerts -- a possible shooter, first seen prowling around Parkwood Elementary this morning (resulting in the police blockade we were stuck behind), is on the loose.

"How long 'til the train comes?"

"About 15."

Enough time, she decides, to disappear down the street in search of coffee. When the train pulls up, for only two passengers besides ourselves, she is not back yet. A conductor is leaning out of the open door in a front car, waving me toward him. I am quaking, dragging our collective luggage slowly, half-bleating "how long can we wait for my friend?" Then my friend is trotting through a fence opening and across the tracks in front of the parked train, triumphant latte bouncing in her grip.    

By the skin of our teeth, the ride is blessedly quiet, the taxi from the Vancouver station quick and friendly, and the hotel amenable to our early check in. We had assumed, when the conference website said this hotel was among our last options, that it was also among the least desirable. On the contrary, Sutton Place, a block off Robson on Burrard, suits us perfectly. The decor is understated old-world, the cozy lobby features a patient concierge with charm to spare, and the restaurant is a sparkling marble and chrome oyster bar. Attached to that is an apres-ski sort of lounge, where we fall into leather club chairs beside the fireplace and order a pair of Kir Royals. After decadent afternoon salads and dessert, we pull our wool coats around us and wander a few square blocks in the crisp early twilight to start getting our Canada on. I introduce Jessica to Roots Apparel and discover that either mine or its style has transformed since the early 2000s. We locate reliable Lush Cosmetics and spend a good while sampling scrubs and lotions before choosing a vodka-infused body salt and peppermint face mask. Last stop is the splendidly situated Sutton Place Wine Merchant next door to the hotel, where we gather ample picnic sundries.

Professional, focused, subdued even -- we commit to an evolved conference Us, in pajamas and plush S -monogrammed robes before 7pm. Some nosh and storytelling, and we're asleep among the piles of pillows in our capacious beds at a very civilized hour. Reward: a wide-eyed morning, up at O.600, for real, and excited about opening sessions on "Sounding Dickinson" and "The Vulnerable Twain." In buttoned-up cardigans and thick scarves we head out, towards the waterfront. Stopping for carry-out crepes and then for Starbucks (one never need feel too far from home), eight blocks down Burrard we reach the vast, light-filled conference center. The network of session rooms takes some negotiating and we only do a couple together, meeting at each break on lobby couches with views of the resplendent harbor, its giant evergreen bowl tasseled with fog, alive with vessels. It still looks so exotic to me; through the wall of windows, Vancouver is my textbook on Europe, Asia, all the international cities to date beyond my reach.

We trade new nuggets of wisdom and inquiry, charge laptops and engage slivers of work correspondence, and consult the floor plan maps for the next moves. Faulkner and Foodways, Memory and Palimpsets, Melville's Civil War and The Canadian Hemingway, Post-Apocalypse Eliot and The Geography of David Simon...Thursday through Saturday, the sessions are so good and the weather so drizzly that we never even follow through with our plan to loop Stanley Park and perhaps see the aquarium. Instead we lunch on very cosmopolitan sushi at Miku Restaurant one day, and gourmet nachos at Mill Marine Bistro the next, followed by a stroll through the little art installation at Harbour Green Park. Returning to the hotel late afternoons, we Skype with Aloe and watch the Christmas decor dismantled on the back roof of the designer store across the street. We suffer a goose chase of stalled elevators and obscurely marked stairwells to a dismal gym/spa which is the hotel's only unsatisfactory feature. Thursday evening we join the LSU party at trendy Grain Tasting Bar for a couple of hours; Friday evening we stay through the late conference session and attend the women's caucus award ceremony. Again and again we go back to our room sooner than later to don bathrobes and face masks, contemplate bizarre Shia Labeouf videos and non-American versions of the breaking news left at our door, and revel in restful sleep. 

Three days in, I astoundingly stretch myself out of bed before Jessica, and suit up to tackle the scene solo. That mild morning euphoria carries me -- all black penny loafer, polka dot, and snug cashmere -- nimbly strong and anonymous on these towering streets in the silver middle of everywhere. I weave through broad umbrellas that protect corporate calls to other time zones, a concert of languages, flapping trench coats and tall boots, floppy knit caps and oversized head phones held snuggly with fingerless gloves, every breath on vaporous display.   

The convention center is its most composed. I'm early to the first session and so can choose my seat by the door, at the end of a back table. A pleasant-faced fellow in an actual patch-elbowed tweed jacket sits a customary two seats over. He comments on my Starbucks cup, and we introduce our Seattle and New Jersey to each other. He asks, "Are you a Melville scholar?"

To him I say, "Oh, no, I'm a Generalist."

To myself I say, "No, Sir, I'm an imposter." A clever one, who earns dozens of spoonful degrees from this expertly curated tasting menu, savoring each intricate amuse-bouche a gratis, compliments of an employer for whom I continue the discussion with real people, obliged to reflect concrete elements on the canvases of real lives, rather than pile more white noise into the ivory tower, amplifying off the pin head into ever wider arcs of conjecture and abstraction.

"I'm at a really small community college," I explain, testing out a tone of relaxed pride, "teaching every lit course we offer." His response is affirming -- he is refreshingly unpretentious enough to imagine the benefits. After the presentation, he wishes me well before turning to talk reunion business with his Melville Society pals, leaving me to meditate on how the right conferences make me ever more glad to be me. Then and there I deem MLA my dedicated professional development adventure indefinitely.

It's the last night, a downtown Saturday party in another country, and we've done so well that we deserve to join in, to get a peek at least, and possibly dance. After consulting the concierge and a couple of websites, we decide on a dinner club called Guilt&Co. in the Gastown district. If we're going for it we must go all in, which I know means Gastown, where my old memories include almost buying a half-pound ziplock bag of oregano and first seeing heroin shot on a bench in broad daylight. Whether or not the drug theme is one way to legitimize which district is the thumping heart of a city center, Gastown is the hipster jewel of Vancouver's crown. It's where people will be teeming underground and in the street past 2am. Thank goodness Jessica lends me her boots, stretched enough to fit me like slippers. We look sharp -- not Vegas sharp, but winter bohemian with an edge -- and we cab the 20ish blocks to conserve our energy.

Down some brick steps is the entrance to our underground club, where, as a party of just two, we get waved past a line of pretty groups and seated at what looks like the last dinner table at the back of a dark sprawling room. Jes gets the seat facing the action, but I can see it in the mirror behind our row of tables. There's a long bar on the wall opposite the entrance, and a big square of lounge space that spills into dance floor in front of a stage with the facade of a rock cave wall behind it. The lights are red and violet. The cocktail list is exquisite reading, themed to provoke choices between the shoulder with the angel on it or the one with devil. The menu includes such astonishments as Ostrich tartar. The lavatory has a W door and an M door which open into a single room; above the sinks is a two-mirror with a view of the whole club. The band offers seventies 70's-80's soul and hip-hop in successions that couldn't make me happier.

After an excellent meal and a respectable helping of champagne, Jessica goes to the dance floor and I move into her seat to observe the show. So comfortably inconspicuous. I amuse myself with the deterioration of the young Euro group smashed together at one high table in front of me, awfully handsy boys and girls both, seeming to overlap partners as we leave midnight behind. Jes spins back to our table sometimes to escape from too-persistent disco dudes. When it's time to go, we emerge up into the street exultant, and meet a neighborhood guy who tells us a dubious story about his wife -- asleep while he makes his rounds as the peter pan chairman of Gastown, because one of them has to open the popular bakery they own in the morning -- and offers to walk us safely home. We oblige for about half the trip, then leave him awkwardly horsing around with a group of young men outside the Tim Horton's. It rains on us the rest of the way and we pick up our pace, though at the corner of Robson and Granville I have to pause and sway a little in the splendor of the Canadian Vegas. I may not be looking for the same things, or seeing them the same way, that I was at the turn of this century, but I should still spend more weekends in this city before another ten years go by.

            

It's a late train Sunday, so we sleep until check out, leave our bags at the desk, try a second round of shopping and get a late Parisian lunch at Bel Cafe in the Georgia Hotel. The train station is more daunting than it was on Wednesday, but we eventually get to our premium seats and situated to watch the sun set across the border. A recent LSU grad finds us and we give him wine while he chatters a bit frantically about his week of interviews. Once more, I'm so glad to get to be me, looking forward to slipping lightly through the next episode. Stay tuned for Austin 2016.