Princeton(ish)

A few weeks ago I went to Princeton, NJ, to interview for a one-year fellowship at a place that I thought was Princeton University but that turned out to be the Institute for Advanced Study, an independent institution that is merely Princeton-adjacent, although it is where Einstein spent his final years. I took to calling Fake Princeton.

I have since been informed that I did not win the fellowship (I've been wait-listed, and I'm not holding my breath), but it was a good trip nonetheless, largely because I had plenty of unscheduled time to wander and think. I'd never to Princeton, but I know Joey went there at least once (I forget the occasion) and really liked it. It's not hard to see why. Ever since he left Oklahoma, and especially in the last couple of years, Joey had been developing rather patrician tastes. I think the University of Virginia, with its neoclassical columns and southern aristocratic ethos, deserves some credit for instilling these tastes, but I also think it simply triggered tendencies that were always latent in his personality. From a very young age he had very high standards in lodgings, for example, standards that were rather unusual for a boy of, say, eight, and together we would circumnavigate every hotel and motel we visited on our family trips to ensure that the place was suitable. I went along on these excursions mostly because I like exploring new places and need to get my bearings in any new situation, but the stakes were much higher for Joey, who had an internal checklist against which he judged each and every Comfort Inn and Super 8 we slept in, and who was not afraid to make his displeasure known if he became, well, displeased. What started with accommodations slowly spread to clothing, wine, restaurants, literature, music, and modes of transport. I don't want to suggest that he was picky or impossible to please - certainly, as he got older, he became less likely to fall into a martyrous funk every time he didn't get his way - but he believed that if he was going to eat something, or drink something, or watch something, or read something, then it should be the best that thing that was within one's means to obtain. Life was too short to settle for second-rate crap when a little bit of effort and ingenuity could get you something better.

And so his tastes became patrician, partly, as I say, because of his time at UVA, and partly, I suspect, because of his time, post-college, with all those high-living lawyers  in Washington, DC. There was no chance of him ever fully joining them - I can no more picture Joey speeding down the Beltway in a late-model BMW sedan, blaring orders into his top-of-the-line smartphone at a slow-witted underling than I can picture him driving an ice-cream truck - but he would undoubtedly have ensured that whatever life he built around himself contained nothing but what he judged to be classy, tasteful, and refined. This was a side of him of which I only caught glimpses in later years, for when we saw one another we were usually on the road or in Oklahoma, not in our everyday worlds, but there were glimpses: Joey ironing his pants before our cousin Jake's wedding in Philadelphia (Joey could iron? Joey wore nice pants?); Joey finding some trendy boutique hotel in Berlin or Nashville or New York through his wizardry with Priceline's Name-Your-Own-Price feature; Joey knowing all about the wine we were drinking and comparing it to wine he'd had at some newly opened Washington bistro where the Obamas were rumored to have dined; and so on. I admit to some feelings of inadequacy on these occasions - I was always a bit more of a class-warrior than he, and, more significantly, a lot less willing to part with my money (my Priceline bids typically landed us in sprawling motels in suburban Minneapolis, not boutique hotels in SoHo) - but I liked to speculate about how our paths would slowly diverge, but always reconnect, as we got older: you know, the tousle-headed professor in second-hand corduroys and his impeccably dressed lawyer brother fighting over the check in some newly opened gastropub in Buenos Aires or Osaka. I would probably have let him win.

Princeton, then, is just Joey's kind of place. Intellectual, east-coast-establishment, preppy but liberal, quaint, old-money, tasteful. It is stuffed with eclectic and (I imagine) stellar restaurants, gourmet ice cream parlors, wonderful bookshops, and a grubby second-hand music store in which I ended up spending quite some time. My interview lasted all of half an hour (I don't know why they didn't just do it over the phone), and so I had most of an evening (outside of a delightful dinner with Kate's cousin Lydia, a Junior at (real) Princeton, and her boyfriend, Dave) and the following morning to wander through the snowy streets on my own, listening to the new Iron & Wine album (which Joey would have loved) and reflecting on all the things I've just been writing about. My lodgings would certainly have earned his approval: a guest house owned by Fake Princeton that was once an early nineteenth-century mansion, with an elegant staircase, a bulging library, and hardcover Everyman editions of the classics of world literature in each room. Oh, and free breakfast.

Being around all this made me feel, if I may indulge in cliché, very close to him.

There's another episode from my Princeton trip that also brought me near him, but I'll have to save that for another day. The morning is getting on, and I have promises left to keep.