A Trip to a Museum

While friends went road-tripping this weekend to Florida, I stayed behind and explored Richmond instead. Explore, though, is stretching it a little. I did drive around much more than I've driven on any other day but most of the places I went to were ones I'm already familiar with. Going downtown to the Edgar Allan Poe museum, however, was new and interesting. The museum exists in the oldest standing building in Richmond, complete with a garden which you instantly recognize as straight out of a 'Poeish' story. Not very surprising given that its design is based on a poem (To One in Paradise) by him. Fresh from that trip I'm steeped in Poe trivia and eager to share it with the world. There are all kinds of anecdotes about about Poe's unfortunate childhood, his hostile foster father, a lost-regained-lost love he first met at the age of 15, a successful military career he deliberately court-martialled from, a wife half his age who was also his first cousin and to top it all his very mysterious death which remains unsolved to this date.
People back then had such interesting lives. Or maybe its just the writer folks who (then and now) have interesting lives. Maybe you end up writing if you have an interesting life in the first place.