I’m sitting in a coffee shop called The General, in South Bend, Indiana. It’s February 2024. I live up the hill, in an apartment building called The Hill, with my wife, the choreographer and dance critic Róisín O’Brien. The Hill is halfway between The University of Notre Dame, where I have an office in the English Department, and the cafés, banks and bars of downtown South Bend. I will have to leave quite soon to be on time for a class I’m auditing, on Theories of the Aesthetic. I am not teaching this semester, but hope to teach a course on Contemporary Irish Literature in the “Fall” semester, on the far side of a summer in which I will be speaking at two literary conferences in Ireland, and one in London.

The coffee shop is a little less than half full, at eleven in the morning. In a booth, four older people — three men and a woman — converse at one of the six occupied tables over coffees. The other five, including mine, have one occupant each. I am one of four loners around my own age who sit along the small tables at the opposite edge to the booth. Three of us are accompanied by a laptop: myself, then a woman in a bobble hat, then a man with a shaven head. At the next table along, beyond the shaven head, another youngish guy is focused on his food. At the final occupied table, in the middle of the shop, a somewhat older man, skinny with goatish greying beard, sits with a coffee, using his phone with an air of nervous intensity. In the time these diners took me to list, three more people have come in: one to buy takeaway cakes in a brown paper bag, one to sit with a couple of books that I can’t quite make out, but have literary-classic softcovers, and one to buy a mug of coffee and disappear into the adjoining bar next door. The music is at a pleasant volume and warmly bassy: even right underneath the wall-mounted speaker, I am not disturbed by the sound of Suki Waterhouse followed by Day Wave. A salmon bagel arrives for the woman with the bobble hat. Another customer enters and buys his drink in a tall takeaway cup but sits with it at a window table, and looks at his phone. The General is not unique, but is unusual for a South Bend coffee shop, in that it doesn’t give you a takeaway cup by default. My coffee is in a black china mug. A coffee costs less than four dollars including a 20% tip, and you get a refill for a dollar plus tip. This makes The General easily one of the cheapest decent coffees in town. You can easily spend seven or eight bucks on a coffee at Starbucks, for example. Two women, both in textured off-white sweaters, enter and claim the booth next to the older foursome. One of the two heads up to order, while the other breaks open her laptop. The guy with the shaven head prepares to pack up his own laptop and leave.

I record these observations for the sake of recording them, to observe my life in this moment. The front of the General, to my left, is glass-paneled allowing a view of Howard Park across the busy road. The wall behind me is painted a light pinkish colour and hung with small paintings. The wall across, where the booth is, is bare brick and hung with large paintings. The back of the shop, to my right, is where the counter and chiller are. There is a thin strip of mirrors at the top of the back wall, bouncing some of the abundant, diffuse daylight, that comes in from the cloudy day through the tall windows, back into the room.

South Bend is a small city heavily inflected by the presence of Notre Dame towards its northern edge. Notre Dame and South Bend are technically different cities. I’ve heard it suggested that the university’s unwillingness to pay tax dollars to the city has something to do with this arrangement. But the City of Notre Dame is an entirely surrounded enclave of South Bend, putting me in mind of The Vatican within the limits of Rome. There is some degree of cross-contamination: my University of Notre Dame Employee ID, and Róisín’s University of Notre Dame Spouse ID, mean we can use the city buses for free. It’s not hard to get out of town(s), if you’ve a mind to. The South Shore Line train to Chicago runs several times a day and costs just fourteen bucks each way, although it takes a while as the central section of the line is being upgraded so you have to get off the train at Gary, onto a bus for twenty minutes, and then back on the train at Dune Park. Chicago is across one state line, into Illinois, which is in the central time zone. The state line and time zone line don’t quite align: the first county before the border is on Central Time too. But South Bend, like most of Indiana, is in the Eastern Time Zone. The nearest part of Lake Michigan is less than an hour’s drive away, and depending exactly which bit of the shoreline you aim for, may take you across a different state line, into Michigan. Róisín and I have made both of those trips, but no others, yet, since we arrived in South Bend just after Christmas.

Other trips we could theoretically make, in the (slightly) scraped Nissan Altima with its red-and-black alloys that was the only car we could afford to buy outright after the Gurley Leep car dealership refused to lease us a car without our having a United States credit history, include Indianapolis, Indiana (2 hours 30 minutes’ drive), Detroit, Michigan (3 hours 20), Toronto, Ontario, Canada (7 hours 30), Minneapolis, Minnesota (7 hours 40), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (10 hrs), New York, New York (11 hours), Miami, Florida (21 hours) Seattle, Washington (31 hours), or San Francisco, California (33 hours). Of these, only Toronto would necessitate crossing an international border. America is a big country, the first big country I’ve lived in since I was an exchange student in Australia in 2010-11.

It’s hard not to read these observations back to myself through the eyes of that exchange student, as though I’ve opened up a chat window to thirteen years ago. I live in America now? I have a wife? I work for a university English Department? Am I a professor? Oh, I’m a postdoc. What’s a postdoc? How many novels have I written? Oh, that’s cool. How many have been published? Oh, that sucks. Australia was the last time I packed a suitcase and moved across the world. There were a lot more suitcases, this time, and it wasn’t just me. That time long ago, it seemed obvious that everything I did should be written down, to relay to the folks back home. I was travelling, and I was me, and that made it interesting.

I’m a bit older now, and still typing into this screen, but with less self-belief and much less conviction that it’s interesting, or a fair thing to ask of folks back home, to read what I tap into my keyboard here in The General, just to see what I have to say. I go months or years without typing anything into the blog that an exchange student updated twice a week, when we was twenty years old.

But, on the other hand, I have never let this domain name lapse. Reasons to Remain.