Last weekend, Peter and I headed to Hartford, Connecticut. Peter had a soccer course he was taking (of course) and I had some reading, shopping and wandering to do (this is my favourite thing to do when Peter has a business trip).
But what does a person do in Hartford, Connecticut? Enter kind Yankees (wives of other soccer aficionados), who happily informed me that there is much to see and do in their fair city. The one thing that caught my attention and held it (okay, after that amazing mall with a Tiffany’s!l), was the possibility that I could, and would. . . walk through Mark Twain’s house.
The very house where he wrote those captivating stories about the adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County as well as that Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Yup, my day was decided. I was going to visit the home of one of the world’s most beloved writers, as well as one of the best humourists in history.
Seriously, who wouldn’t go?
Walking up to the front door with the tour guide, I could feel the writer in me wanting to push through the rest of the crowd and rush into the house to soak up some of Mr. Twain’s genius. Where was his desk? His writing instruments? Where did he brainstorm? Get out of my way!
Then that nasty tour guide rained on my parade when he said we must all stay together and not even think of touching any of the Twain belongings.
Fine. Patience is totally one of my virtues.
The house itself was dramatic and impressive. We learned that the Twain family was big on impressing their guests, and that the best room in the house was the guest bedroom suite. I could have been one of his guests, sitting in any number of cozy chairs (why were people so much shorter in the 19th century, anyway?), listening to anything Mark Twain wanted to say.
We’d been on the tour for 45 minutes and we still hadn’t seen his study, where he did his writing. I think I was starting to break out in a sweat, wanting so badly to be in the room where such great creation took place.
Then, on the second floor, as we stood in what was the playroom and classroom for his three daughters, the tour guide told us what I’d been dying to hear. “Since Mark could get no peace from the noise of his daughters, he moved his office and study upstairs to the third floor where he wrote some of his most famous works.”
I was at the back of the crowd. I turned and looked up the stairs. I could make a dash, maybe take one of those back servant’s passages that the tour guide mentioned. I could find and sit at Mark Twain’s desk. I could touch something that he touched, maybe soak up some creative greatness, some of his spirit somehow.
Hey, I’m a writer, can you blame me?
But there was no chance to touch, to soak. The ropes were defiant and the tour guide ever watchful.
But I stood in that room. Mere inches from where Mark Twain sat and wrote some of the most amazing stories of his career.Those stories still live on, and I can’t wait to read about Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn all over again, while I picture Mark Twain sitting at his wooden desk with a cigar in his mouth and a pen poised over paper, wondering how Tom Sawyer will get his friends to help him whitewash that fence.
