Standing among (amiable) ghosts

They were barely more than an arm’s-length away – a primitive desk, a simple chair and an old, low-to-the-ground metal bed frame. But they were the very furnishings that Henry David Thoreau had used during his time at Walden Pond, where he wrote some of the most memorable lines in American literature. I had been a major admirer when I studied him in college – writing down his instructive observations (“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,” comes to mind) in a special notebook and even christening my first car, a used Volkswagen Beetle with a peace sign I applied to the side, “Henry David Car.” And here I was, standing before the desk where those lines had likely been written, and the bed – brought with his other furnishings back to his family home after he left Walden Pond – where my hero had actually died. It was my first visit to the Concord Museum in Concord, Mass., but the first of what I’m sure will be many. For not only were Thoreau’s belongings on display, but, in the very next chamber stood Ralph Waldo Emerson’s furniture, arranged exactly as the pieces had stood in his study in the Emerson House across the street – including the desk where he wrote. It is a special place, this museum, with more than 35,000 objects spanning the history of historic Concord, from the time of the Native Americans to the present. Even a lantern, taken from the steeple of the building where Paul Revere began his famous ride, is there. Thoreau and Emerson were great friends in life, of course, and I couldn’t help but wonder what conversations might still go on between those two great men after the visitors leave and the lights in the Concord Museum go out every night. I wish I could be there to listen.