But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
          Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
          For promis’d joy!

Robert Burns (1759-1796; considered to be the National Poet of Scotland; from his “To a Mouse”)

Without a doubt, you’re familiar with the poetic lines, “The best laid schemes of mice and men often go astray,” even if you don’t know that Robert Burns penned them.

The lines express a universal truth. Yet, many people have trouble accepting it. Or, maybe, they simply have trouble admitting it when their meticulous plans go awry, sometimes dreadfully so.

Down through the years, it’s happened to me so often that I can accept the poem’s truth readily. More important, I don’t mind admitting it when my best-laid plans flop.

My recent trip to Vermont is a perfect example. I planned it way back in March, just as soon as I knew that my edition of Green Mountain Stories would be launched in Burlington on May 25 and again in Brattleboro on May 30.

I decided that it could also be a much-needed vay-kay for me and my dog Ruby.

But let me ask you this. Have you ever gone on a 10-day road trip with your furry, four-legged best friend, alone with no other person traveling with you?

If so, you know already what I had to learn the hard way: it’s not really your road trip. It’s your dog’s. As I made my careful plans, it became obvious to me that everything was being built around Ruby’s needs:

● How far could she ride in a day?

● Would the hotel mid-way up and mid-way back accept a dog?

● Would the VRBO home rental in Burlington accept a dog? What about a yard so that Ruby could play?

● Would the VRBO home rental in Brattleboro accept a dog? What about a yard so that Ruby could play?

Those were my big concerns. I won’t bother you with the small ones because just a few days before my trip, my best-laid plans fell apart.

It became clear to me, to Ruby, and to our veterinarian that she would be happier staying at a pet spa rather than staying stressed out for such a long trip.

By then, it was too late to change any of my lodging arrangements. The cancellation windows had closed.

● Yeah. It would have been great to stay in swanky downtown hotels and walk to restaurants and nightspots.

● Yeah. It would have been great to fly to Vermont. Or, maybe, drive to DC’s Union Station and journey by Amtrak.

But those options were never part of my Rubyesque best-laid plans. Now it was too late. Fine. I knew that the book launches would go well. As for the rest of the road trip without Ruby, I was determined to make the most of the situation.

At that point, I had no great expectations. None. But that was okay, too. Sometimes life gets better when we expect less. And so it came to be on this trip. My serendipitous encounters took me far greater distances than the distance I would travel. Let me share a few with you.

By the time that I reached Hazelton, PA–three hours or so from my home in Edinburg, VA, driving North on I-81–it was as if I had stepped back into early Spring. The forest canopy was see-through thin, and the leaves were so small, so new, so filled with promise that I immediately started reciting to myself, aloud, for no one else was around to hear, Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay”:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief.
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

I love that poem on so many levels, not the least of which is knowing how much effort Frost put into revising it. It didn’t spring into existence as the exquisite 8-line octave that we know. The revision history of the poem–even my sketchy recollection of it–fascinates me because Frost maintained that he did not revise his poems a lot. Here’s how he put it:

A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and having carried the poet with it (“The Figure a Poem Makes,” Collected Poems, 1939).

Frost might disagree, but it seems to me that he worried “Nothing Gold Can Stay” into existence. Let me explain. It started out as three octaves, for a total of 24 lines. More important, the original title was “Nothing Golden Stays.” Well, hello. Duh! Of course, nothing golden stays. Golden is a characteristic. It’s not the real thing.

But after four or five needed revisions, Frost distilled 24 poetic lines into the 8 that we enjoy today, and he changed golden to gold, knowing fully well that if nothing gold can stay we had all damned well better sit up and take notice, especially considering that even Eden sank to grief.

I could go on and on about this poem, but if I do, I’ll not be able to share other parts of my road trip that exceeded expectations. I had better put the pedal to the metal.

Wow! Two asphalt-hours are in my rear-view mirror, I didn’t get a speeding ticket, and I’ve reached my trip’s mid-way destination, headed north: a hotel in Johnson City, NY.

Approaching the city, I was thrilled beyond expectations to see a sign: HOME OF DAVID SEDARIS. Sedaris is one of my favorite writers, yet I had no idea that he was from Johnson City. Imagine that! And here I was sleeping … right in his … home … town. That’s almost downright sultry.

I’ve known Sedaris–not personally but rather as a humorist, comedian, and author–for decades, going all the way back to 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay “Santaland Diaries.” I have always appreciated and enjoyed his self-deprecating humor, his candor about growing up gay in middle-class America in the late Sixties and the early Seventies, and his open-and-oft-written-about commitment to his long-time partner Hugh Hamrick. Hamrick has a few things to say about their relationship, too: “Hugh Hamrick—David Sedaris’ Boyfriend—Finally Tells His Side of Their Story.”

After I got settled in my Johnson City hotel room, I decided that I’d spend the evening in bed with Sedaris. (Re-reading some of his essays on my all-time favorites list.)

It was a “wild night, wild night.“ (Of reading.) I awakened the next morning refreshed and ready to continue my journey.

Not long after leaving Johnson City, I saw signs announcing that I was in New York State’s Southern Tier. I’m not sure why, but I always chuckle when I see those Southern Tier signs. But my laughter subsided as I started seeing birch trees everywhere, as far as I could see. And I immediately thought of Robert Frost’s poem, “Birches,” but since I have written extensively about that poem already in my “A Swinger of Birches,” I will say no more about the poem here except to quote its opening lines:

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

An hour or so later, I started seeing signs for Cooperstown, NY. It goes without saying that I fully expected to see a sign: HOME OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. I had every right to have that expectation since the town was named after the Cooper family, since Cooper was America’s first novelist to earn his living as a writer, and since Cooperstown and the surrounding frontier served as the backdrop for The Pioneers, the first of five novels in his Leatherstocking Tales.

I did not see the sign that I had expected. Instead, I saw signs announcing Cooperstown as Home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. It’s too bad that Cooper’s hometown doesn’t consider him to be a Major League player.

An hour or so later, I approached Saratoga Springs, NY. I was ecstatic. Saratoga Springs. The setting for most of the action in Sherwood Anderson’s famous rite-of-passage short story “I Want to Know Why.”

But about Saratoga. We was there six days and not a soul from home seen us and everything came off just as we wanted it to, fine weather and horses and races and all. We beat our way home and Bildad gave us a basket with fried chicken and bread and other eatables in, and I had eighteen dollars when we got back to Beckersville. Mother jawed and cried but Pop didn’t say much. I told everything we done except one thing. I did and saw that alone. That’s what I’m writing about. It got me upset. I think about it at night. Here it is.

How’s that. The unnamed fifteen-year-old narrator goes back home and tells his parents everything that happened in Saratoga except for the one thing that he “did and saw alone.”

What he doesn’t tell his parents is the passion and love that he feels for Jerry Tilford, a horse trainer. What he doesn’t tell his parents is what he saw Tilford doing in a farmhouse with a “bad woman.” What he doesn’t tell his parents is how he felt about Tilford when he saw what he saw:

Then, all of a sudden, I began to hate that man. I wanted to scream and rush into the room and kill him. I never had such a feeling before. I was mad clean through and I cried and my fists were doubled up so my finger nails cut my hands.

The story ends the next spring with the narrator, nearly sixteen, still wanting to know why Jerry Tilford did what he did. I suspect that the narrator spent his entire life being upset by his feelings and by Jerry’s actions. I suspect that the narrator spent his entire life wondering why things didn’t work out as he hoped they would work out.

It’s one of the most haunting stories about coming-of-age, sexual desire, and rejection that you can ever hope to read. Anderson deals with the topic far more overtly in his story “The Man Who Became a Woman.” After you read that story, you simply must read Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919). It’s an overlooked classic in American literature.

Two hours or so later, I reached my first book-launch destination: Burlington, VT. I am embarrassed to say that even though I love Ben & Jerry’s Ice-Cream, I had no idea that Burlington has been its home since 1978 when they started dishing it out. Today, it’s still their home, with 282 million pints of deliciousness churned annually.

After Burlington, I headed south to Brattleboro for a second launch of Green Mountain Stories. Obviously, I need not remind you that Mary E. Wilkins Freeman–the author of Green Mountain Stories–launched her career in Brattleboro.

What else can I share about Brattleboro that might exceed your expectations?

Royall Tyler, America’s first playwright whose The Contrast (1787) still enjoys theatrical productions, moved to Brattleboro in 1801 and is buried there in Prospect Hill Cemetery.

Then, of course, we have Rudyard Kipling, English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist, known for being the first English-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1907). What most folks don’t know is that he married Caroline Balestier of Brattleboro in 1892, moved there–initially living in Bliss Cottage where he wrote The Jungle Book (1894)–and then built Naulakha, which is on the Landmark Trust USA. What even fewer people know is that Freeman met Kipling in the Spring of 1892, on one of her return visits to Brattleboro. Later, she wrote to a friend:

The spell of Ruddy’s eyes have faded away, but my heart still clings to the coupe driver. (Letter 111 to Evelyn Sawyer Severance, The Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, ed. with Biographical/Critical Introductions by Brent L. Kendrick. Scarecrow, 1985.)

And what almost no one knows is that Saul Bellow–acclaimed Canadian-American Nobel Laureate in Literature and author of such noteworthy novels as Dangling Man (1944), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), and Henderson the Rain King (1959)–lived in Brattleboro for the last 26 years of his life and is buried there in the Shir He Harim Jewish Cemetery section of Morningside Cemetery.

The morning after my Brattleboro book launch, I started the long drive back home. I intended it to be a straight shot on interstates. Somehow–accidentally, I should add–my Gladiator’s Navigation System was programmed to AVOID HIGHWAYS. And I was programmed to DON’T THINK. I just kept right on going down one country back road after another, paying them nary no mind whatsoever. After all, I was getting an up-close-and-personal view of Vermont’s Green Mountains.

The next thing I knew, I was approaching Ulster, NY, with signs announcing HEADLESS HORSEMAN HAYRIDES AND HAUNTED HOUSES. Oh. My. God. How the hell did I end up in the Lower Catskills where folks still scare themselves with Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820).

Suffice it to say, I had given myself my own fright. Immediately, I adjusted my Navigation System, got back on my intended route, settled in to Cruise Control, and clicked my boots together three times, saying “There’s no place like home.”

Before I knew it, I had picked up Ruby from the pet spa. As I drove back up my mountain road, I shared with her brief highlights of my road trip beyond expectations. But as soon as I saw our house, I stopped my storytelling and shouted:

“But anyway, Ruby, we’re home–home.”