The Happy Dog, on Cleveland’s West Side was the perfect venue for a reading and celebration. It is a classic Cleveland bar: low corner brick building, with one small high window, so no one can tell who’s in there drinking. I took the Rapid Transit from the Terminal Tower to West 65th Street, dazzled by the sights: the graceful arc of a bridge over the Flats (the Detroit-Superior?), crews paddling on the snaky Cuyahoga, forsythia in the scrub along the tracks, trees frothy with blossoms. Every city looks better in the spring. I walked up 65th from Lorain to Detroit, using St. Colman’s to orient myself. I had once stayed overnight with a friend who lived in this neighborhood, and we had gone to Mass there, and I knew to keep it on my right as I headed north, toward the lake. Navigating by Catholic churches and Lake Erie: I was definitely back in Cleveland.

I meet the organizers at a restaurant called Spice in an area now known as Gordon Square. The event was organized by Anne Trubek, someone whom, before last night, I had known only from a distance and online. She is the founder of Rust Belt Chic and Belt Magazine, in which she recently printed an excerpt from my book, choosing the chapter about the pencil-sharpener museum, and she is a powerhouse. She thinks we would fight about grammar and usage and punctuation, and maybe we would, but it would be fun. From our table at Spice we could see people filing into the Happy Dog. There went my cousins! I got nervous and stopped eating halfway through my grilled artichoke.

It was cousins I spotted first when I went into the joint (“joint” is the perfect word for this kind of Cleveland bar): Carl and Catherine and their eager young daughter Jane, who is thrilled to be related to an author. I recognized my former geometry teacher, Joanne Madison, ex-Sister Joanne Dula, who is married and retired from the I.R.S. Suddenly a former classmate appeared—the one who takes charge of class reunions—and I felt exactly as I did when she appeared in gym class in high school. My friend Patti, whose pleasure in my book’s success seems to exceed my own, said hi, and Paula, who was at the New York party and drove to Cleveland to be at this one, too. Strangers started pressing books on me to sign. Finally, I had to say, “Do you mind waiting? I have to concentrate.”

To prepare, I had looked in the index under “Cleveland.” I made short work of the section indexed under “author’s youth in” (foot-checking, milk route) and read from the chapter on gender, in which my fabulous sister Baby Dee acquired her first pairs of ladies’ shoes in the Euclid Arcade. For my parents, I read from the chapter on profanity (cousins visiting from California had already heard in San Francisco), and, just to punctuate the evening, I read from the chapter on dashes, about the uppercase Dashes of Meadowbrook Avenue, who were customers of Charles Chips.

I almost forgot the Q&A part of the evening—I’d begun to think of it solely as a celebration—and this was a challenging group to field questions from. Some German women who had learned English as a second language wanted to scold Americans for their bad grammar. Charles Michener, a former colleague who moved back to Cleveland, challenged my use of the “s” on “backwards”; I think he just wanted me to know he was there. Later, in the ladies’ room, a woman who works in advertising buttonholed me to say that she is reviled by her friends for eschewing the serial comma. I was able to comfort her. A woman who gradually came into focus as the mother of my late friend Mary Beth Richlovsky spoke up about her daughter’s and my friendship. I think somehow staying in touch with me helps her keep Mary Beth alive.

There are others who are no longer with us who would have been proud and amazed to know that I had succeeded in publishing a book, among them my mother and father. I am so grateful that there were people at the Happy Dog last night who could picture my mother whooping it up and my father taking off his glasses and wiping his eyes.

(Last image by Paul Putman. Thanks!)