Not among them either

     Lord George Gordon Byron did not, I feel safe saying, ever tramp his gray suburb on a cold February evening. Block after empty block, his only company a small dog who, though perky as always, could not herself populate a neighborhood the way, oh for instance, people could.
     Where is everybody? Inside, of course, scrolling TikTok, making dinner, watching television, or poring over the grim news — I'm not speaking of anything specific, just the general dismantling of the country by bad people. Couldn't there be another dog walker, kids playing, anything? Someone in the distance? A car? This is like one of those austerity sets that the Lyric Opera inflicts on their audiences where Valhalla is represented by a blue lightbulb and some twisted tinsel. 
    So to make things worse, I conjure up Byron ... why?
    As reproach? To torture myself. The dashing romantic hero. Profile like an alp. He swam the Hellspont — first person to do so.  Fame, intrigues, travel. To use him as a personal yardstick is nuts. 
    So why then? As comfort? That makes more sense. I was a Eugene O'Neill fan as a teen, and that snatch of Byron in "Touch of the Poet" lodged itself in my bowl haircut Ohio head:

I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
I have not flattered it's rank breath, nor bowed
To its idolatries a patient knee
Nor coined my cheeks to smiles, nor cried aloud
In worship of an echo, in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such, I stood
Among them but not of them...

     Because I was special. In my own mind, if nowhere else. How grandiose is that? I loved those lines for the same reason Cornelius Melody does in "Touch of the Poet" — trying to present himself as something better than his drab surroundings.  A gem in the muck. Brush the hay from my shoulders and quote Byron. Those lines prompted me to read "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" — I remember nothing of the book but writing a paper on it for Bonnie Brown's World Lit class in 12th grade.

     In my 30s, I did grasp at reproducing Lady Caroline Lamb's famous assessment of Byron as "mad, bad and dangerous to know." I failed mightily. 

     Byron receded in my later life — he doesn't quite go with middle age. No Philip Larkin he. I did not have the good sense that Byron did to die at 36, fighting for Greek independence. Spared himself the sour years. 

     Coward. Being dashing romantic heroes is easy, I imagine. Tougher to be the lone watchmen of Center Avenue, walking the streets in a dead patrol. Smart enough to know that not every day is golden. Some days are February. Some days you get the bear, and some days the bear...

    Actually, Byron left behind a little help here, some bracing words for those of us who are, far later than we should be, still sprawled in the middle of a messy pile the small parts of Life as sold by Ikea, trying to figure out how to put the damn thing together. In an 1821 letter to his biographer, the Irish poet Thomas Moore, Byron recounts how he met a young visitor, who seemed disappointed in meeting a great poet.

   "But I suspect that he did not take quite so much to me, from his having expected to meet a misanthropical gentleman, in wolf-skin breeches, and answering in fierce monosyllables, instead of a man of this world," Byron wrote. "I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?"

    Or as I like to think of it, if you ever hope to reach mountaintops, on rare occasions, then you must be willing to spend most of your time plodding up the sides of mountains. Which can be hard, lonely work. But worthwhile nonetheless. Or so I recall.