Yesterday, I took the train north to begin a weeklong stay at the Hudson Valley Writers Residency. For my train reading, I brought along the book Learning to Look at Sculpture because I have been searching for a primer on sculpture in order to grow smarter for the Mark di Suvero sections of the dog café book. (I have decided on the title We Live in Hidden Cities, but its every day title is “the dog café book” or, as a texting friend typo-ed to me recently, “dog cage.”) I didn’t learn much about sculpture beyond “it is an art form with which we share space.” I fell into conversation with my Amtrak seatmate, a handsome young woman in the vein of Julia Stiles.

Readers are reminded that the description of this website contains the phrase “champion of the chance encounter.”

My seatmate was on the last leg of her trip home from Scotland, where she had gone on an Outlander tour. (“Lallybroch!” “The Battle of Culloden!”) I am fluent enough in Outlander (the show, not the books) and then we branched into various things Scottish. I told her that it is my ambition to do a residency at Hawthornden Castle outside Edinburgh, and that I was on my way to a residency for the week. What am I working on? The history of one block in my neighborhood. She told me that she was majoring in history and had recently written a paper about how women’s history, so often obscured from the written record, can often be found in textiles. She attends SUNY Empire, an online program, which enables her to help out on the family farm, further upstate, where her family raises livestock, mainly sheep.

It struck me that leaving a sheep farm to vacation in Scotland was something of a busman’s holiday. I didn’t say this to her because she is 20-something and I doubted that she would know the term.

Instead, I said, “So you’re a shepherdess.”

Her mother is writing an historical novel about the family farm. I am all for historical novels (having written one and having one in a state of benign abandonment) and read over the summer Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound, which a poetry professor at MY SUNY program told us was a collection of short stories written in a form called hook-and-chain, a form popularized in New England in the 19^th century, which follows the pattern a bb cc dd ee ff a. I recommended this book to the shepherdess, along with Andrea Barrett, who I recommend to everyone. She didn’t write any of this down – I was a stranger on a train bothering a young woman who’d flown to JFK from Scotland, then taken the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station to get an Amtrak to take her upstate to her farm. But maybe she will see this.

Champion of the chance encounter.

Earlier this summer, I visited the Queens Historical Society to see if I could get an answer to the question, “What was that parcel of land that juts into the East River between the time it was Stephen Halsey’s house and the time it was turned into NYCHA Housing?” I looked at maps and chatted with Jason Antos, the historian on site. Then since I was on the 7 line anyway, I took the 7 train to the Trader Joe’s in Long Island City, where I wound up chatting with the cashier as she checked me out. She too is a history student and had written a paper on the history of the Gowanus Canal. She later read this very blog and sent me a brief history of remonstrances, which I had been in search of, curious as to whether there was a precedent for the Flushing Remonstrance, or whether that particular set of early Long Islanders came up with the idea of writing a public letter to Peter Stuyvesant to protest his religious intolerance. (They did not come up with it. Remonstrances were a thing going back to King John of Magna Carta fame, according to the historian currently working the cash register at the Long Island City Trader Joe’s.)

Historians are everywhere, might be the moral of this post. Or, it pays to talk to strangers. Also to carry a business card.