Amy Cavanaugh

If it is all the same to you I would rather not expound on that.

Via the Paris Review.

Recent Writings

Two recently-published pieces that I loved writing:

• For the Boston Globe, my favorite Loop lunch (and one breakfast) spots.

• For Chicagoist, some of Chicago’s connections to the Titanic.

One will make you hungry, the other will make you cry.

First Times

Lists of Note has a list of 17 novels that Hemingway would rather read again for the first time than make a million dollars a year. I understand the feeling—I always value experiences over things and while I’ve read most of the books on my favorites list more than once, there is nothing that can capture the breathless excitement of the first reading of something you really love. It’s like those last few moments before you kiss someone you really like for the first time—you both know it’s going to happen and the anticipation is enough to nearly destroy you. Then it happens, and while subsequent ones won’t have the same breathless excitement as the first time, they’re amazing in different ways. The same is true with each re-reading.

I remember the first time I read my favorite book, The Secret History. It was 2002, and the book had already been out for ten years, but I somehow missed it until I found it at a book sale in the basement of a library in Connecticut. All I had to go on was the cover, which had a classical bust on the front and rave reviews on the back. I remember sliding it back onto the shelf, unsure if I really wanted it, then going back and buying it for $2. I’ve long had an affinity for the classics, and sometimes judging a book by its cover works.

I recall folding myself into a white wicker chair and opening the book on my knees while a breeze blew in off the ocean and the Red Sox game played on the radio. I remember reading it in the car next to my mother with a cat meowing away in the backseat, even though reading in moving vehicles makes me dizzy, because I did not want to stop. But then, knowing that I had to be alone when I finished it, I slid a bookmark in and returned it to my bag. I cried at the end, partly due to what happened and partly to finishing it. I’ve read it at least five times in the ten years since then, and each time I get more from it. It’s a book I read when things are unstable, when I need a reminder of a time that was steeped in possibility.

Each time is wonderful, but you never forget the first time. So much of something’s importance is based on when we first experience it, but sometimes something can become important later. There are books (The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird) that I first read when I was too young too appreciate them. There are people I’ve met that I wasn’t quite ready for—the first time I met one of my closest friends we were not impressed with each other in the slightest. It took multiple meetings over the course of a year to become friends, and now we laugh about it. When I read The Secret History, I was less than two months from starting college and ready to do completely brand new things; it was the same state that the narrator is in at the beginning of the book, and while my next few years diverged vastly from what occurred in the book, my mindset was similar.

The best book I’ve read in the past year has been The Art of Fielding, which I started last fall in my parents’ house after everyone had gone to bed. I bought it because I had heard rumblings that it was good and that it had some connection to baseball. I couldn’t sleep and I cracked open the navy blue spine to fall into a story that completely echoed my feelings at the moment—loneliness coupled with the tinge that I knew things would be getting better. A synchronicity emerged in which I felt like the pages had been written exclusively for me and that I was supposed to be doing nothing else but reading them at that exact moment. I had an early interview the next morning and forced myself to go to bed, which broke the spell. The book was still amazing overall, and I’ve since given it to or recommended it to many people, but I couldn’t recapture the feeling of those initial pages.

Nostalgia and memory are two themes that I often return to in my own writing, and probably because I’m so drawn to vintage things, history, and untouched places. It’s why, also, I’m trying to be better about appreciating these first times as they happen and not only realizing their meaning until later.

Moxie & Patience

As much as I’d like to have Nick’s Nest hot dogs or orange pineapple ice cream from Hallmark Drive-In all the time, I like things that you can’t always get simply because you want them at that moment. Much like the way I get irritated when someone breaks out an iPhone to settle a debate, instead of taking time to think about it, I think that waiting for things can be good, because it’s more special when we finally get them.

One of the things I wait for is Moxie, a darkly bitter soda that you can’t get outside New England. Even though I have met exactly four people who like it (two are related to me, and one is a Chicago chef who has his mom ship it to him), the soda has a cult following. There’s a Moxie Festival in Maine each summer that I want to attend some day.

This weekend I went to get quiche and coffee at Matto Fornaio, the tiny Italian bakery two blocks from my house. While there, I was looking at all the flavors of San Pellegrino available. There was one called Chinotto, which I had never heard of, so I asked the man behind the counter what it tastes like.

“It’s like an adult Coca-Cola,” he said. “Do you like really bitter flavors? I don’t recommend it to anyone who doesn’t like a bitter taste.”

I took the tiny glass bottle home, not even thinking that it would be like Moxie. Like all San Pellegrino sodas, the taste is subtle, so Chinotto is considerably weaker than the Maine soda. The bitterness doesn’t have the same punch as Moxie, but it’s the closest I’ve come to finding this flavor outside of the orange can. So when people here ask me what Moxie tastes like, I’m going to take them for Chinotto. But I probably won’t drink it myself, because I want that first sip of Moxie I have when I’m home to taste as good as it possibly can.

Lost In The Pages Of A Book

I regularly buy used books, and when browsing in a store I’ll often flip through pages to see what people have left behind. In a library book, I recently found someone’s itinerary for a trip to Las Vegas. I’ve found receipts, scrawled lists on front and end pages, and other items that give insight into who held the book first.

Today I picked up my copy of British Historic Houses Handbook, edited by Neil Burton. Yes, I own this. I got it five years ago at the University of Maryland English department book sale. I was sitting in the English lounge reading or writing, and saw it sitting on the shelf. For some reason I thought, “this will some day be useful.” It hasn’t yet, and I obviously never even paged through it, because when I did today, this birthday note fell out.

I wish that the dentist had written the year instead of “today,” but a Google search told me that he was in the news last year for saving the day in an escalator accident at L’Enfant Plaza in D.C. He also owns patents for dental mirrors and watches that keep track of tides and sounds like a character.

Did Widen give the book to Theresa before she took a trip to England? The price is cut out of the front flap of the book jacket. Or was she simply using it as a bookmark? I had an English professor named Theresa while at the University, and maybe this book was hers.

I love thinking about the previous owners of something, and it’s why I’d rather get a used book than a brand new one. Especially since this book is from 1982, before I was born, and it’s fun to think about relationships between people and other things that went on before I existed. It’s also tempting to track down these people, but I don’t think I could bear receiving word, decades from now, that an old friend or love had put a book I inscribed to them up for sale. Some things are better lost, in the pages of a book.