{"id":174,"date":"2026-05-23T12:35:57","date_gmt":"2026-05-23T12:35:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=174"},"modified":"2026-05-23T12:35:57","modified_gmt":"2026-05-23T12:35:57","slug":"what-gets-kept","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=174","title":{"rendered":"What Gets Kept"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A glass ashtray\u2014the kind you used to find often in American households\u2014was recently on exhibit in the second-floor gallery of the Grolier Club. It was in a display case, ashes and all. If you had seen it on a coffee table, you might have thought that the smoker had just left the room, and could still be somewhere close by. But the ashes were fifty-six years old; they must have dropped from a cigarette Jack Kerouac was smoking the day he died, unexpectedly, in St. Petersburg, Florida, at the age of forty-seven. Born poor, he died broke, with his books out of fashion, although he was still a household name.<\/p>\n

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When I saw the ashes, I wondered who had found them. Was it Jack\u2019s third wife, Stella, who couldn\u2019t bear to throw them out? Or was it his mother who insisted on keeping them? He called her M\u00e9m\u00e8re; she and Jack\u2019s father had been born in Quebec and had raised him in a French-speaking enclave of Lowell, Massachusetts. M\u00e9m\u00e8re was a woman who saved things\u2014a bit of string, a quarter of an onion, the accumulating boxes of papers that her son left in her keeping while he set out to know the country where he felt only half American.<\/p>\n

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The ashes, carefully sealed up somehow, were evidently added to everything else that got packed in 1969, from a pair of Jack\u2019s pajama bottoms\u2014also destined to become a collector\u2019s item\u2014to the iconic scroll of \u201cOn the Road,\u201d which was recently sold at Christie\u2019s, purchased by the country singer Zach Bryan, for twelve million dollars, one of the highest sums ever paid for a literary manuscript. All of it got shipped north and stored for years in a barn in Lowell, where Jack\u2019s brother-in-law, John Sampas, kept the used furniture that he sold in flea markets. When Stella died, in 1990, her family made Sampas Jack\u2019s literary executor. During the next four decades, he sold Jack\u2019s personal belongings and portions of his archive to dealers and collectors.<\/p>\n

The ashes were acquired by the archivist and bookseller Jacob Loewentheil, who, about fifteen years ago, bought Jack\u2019s copy of Dostoyevsky\u2019s \u201cThe Possessed.\u201d As he looked at the passages Jack had underlined, he felt a profound connection to him and a desire to collect other things that would give him \u201ca tangible link to Kerouac,\u201d as he put it. No doubt some of the visitors to the Grolier felt the thrill of propinquity as they looked at the remains of one of Jack\u2019s last cigarettes, but, for me, they were reminders of his absence, and the lasting strangeness of his fame, and how his kisses always tasted of Lucky Strikes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I have my own Kerouac collection. It starts with the red-and-black-checked shirt that he told me to look for when I met him on a blind date one January night in 1957. Even without it I would have noticed him right away as he sat at the front counter of the Howard Johnson\u2019s in Greenwich Village. He was so arrestingly good-looking, with his black hair and blue eyes, and the ruddy complexion of someone who couldn\u2019t be contained within the walls of a New York apartment. No one else looks like that, I thought.<\/p>\n

I was twenty-one. On a shelf at the literary agency where I was working as a secretary, I\u2019d recently found a copy of Jack\u2019s first novel, \u201cThe Town and the City.\u201d I\u2019d stayed up all night reading it, with the feeling that it was reading me, that I could have been one of the characters trying out some new, free way to live after leaving home. I studied the author photo on the back cover: John Kerouac, age twenty-seven, with a necktie and a neatly pressed jacket and a serious, slightly melancholy expression. The photo had been taken seven years earlier. He had written eight unpublished books since then, and lived much closer to the edge.<\/p>\n

My arrival at the Howard Johnson\u2019s seemed to have interrupted his train of thought. After I sat down, he let me know that solitude was what he was craving most at that moment. He\u2019d spent the past summer as a fire lookout on a mountain out West called Desolation Peak. \u201cI wish I was there now,\u201d he said, his eyes on my face. I wondered if he always told people exactly what he was thinking.<\/p>\n

He ordered me a cup of coffee, but when it came he said, with some embarrassment, that I\u2019d have to pay for it\u2014he had bought a pack of Luckies with his last twenty dollars and had been badly shortchanged. I guessed he hadn\u2019t eaten, so I offered to buy him a meal; I\u2019d never bought anyone a meal in my life. He ordered the cheapest dish on the menu, frankfurters and beans. Then we sat at the counter talking, mostly about books. I got up the nerve to tell him that I\u2019d started working on a novel. To my surprise, that interested him\u2014most men wouldn\u2019t have wanted to hear about it. He laughed when I told him I loved Henry James, and said I needed new influences. By the time he suggested we go uptown to my place, I found myself saying, \u201cIf you wish.\u201d As we walked out into the street, he put on a shabby brown leather jacket that looked as if it had been through a lot, in many different places.<\/p>\n

Once, I asked him how old the jacket was, and he said he\u2019d got it during the war, when he first shipped out as a merchant seaman. In \u201cThe Town and the City,\u201d he described that voyage on \u201ca great proud bark back from homeless seas,\u201d but I only learned decades later, from Jack\u2019s journals, that he\u2019d signed on as a scullion, and sailed on the S.S. Dorchester. The ship carried hundreds of construction workers who were heading to Greenland to build an airfield, and Jack, who was then on a break from Columbia University, scrubbed pots and peeled potatoes in a galley run by three Black cooks. He wrote about each of them: the one who kept finding fault with his work and called him Stupid; the one named Glory, whom he considered a born leader; and the gay pastry chef, who conducted religious services on deck. It was the pastry chef who had offered Jack the warm leather jacket, insisting that he keep it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Six months later, in February, 1943, most of the men Jack sailed with that summer\u2014including Glory and the pastry chef\u2014were killed when the Dorchester was torpedoed by a German U-boat. More than six hundred people died. Jack was so shattered by the news that his hands shook for weeks afterward. I remember him wearing the leather jacket even after he became famous and could have afforded a new one. I wonder if it reminded him of what Buddhists call the void. We were all heading there, he told me more than once, though he knew I didn\u2019t like to hear about that.<\/p>\n

The week before our blind date, Jack\u2019s previous girlfriend had thrown him out of her apartment, on the advice of her psychiatrist, so he was in serious need of a place to stay, as he had often been during his travels. Since I happened to be a young woman with an apartment of her own\u2014something of a rarity in those days\u2014Allen Ginsberg, whom I\u2019d recently got to know, had arranged for us to meet. My two haphazardly furnished rooms were in a brownstone a couple of blocks from Columbia. The windows looked out on a back yard where generations of bedsprings rusted and a tree of heaven grew. Just before we stepped inside, he pulled me close and kissed me. \u201cI don\u2019t like blondes,\u201d he murmured, which I thought was too ridiculous to take seriously. By the time we\u2019d left the subway and his arm dropped around me as we walked along Broadway, it was clear that we were going to be friends, whatever else we might be to each other.<\/p>\n

I had just survived a bad breakup and a really awful year, which should have made me cautious. Instead, I had a nothing-to-lose feeling. The next day, Jack moved into my apartment with a zippered sports bag that he picked up from the cheap hotel on Eighth Street where he\u2019d been staying. It contained a notebook and a couple of changes of clothes, mostly from the Salvation Army.<\/p>\n

I knew he\u2019d be leaving as soon as he got his first five-hundred-dollar check for \u201cOn the Road,\u201d which Viking Press was finally going to publish after three years of maddening indecision. Still, by the time Jack boarded a freighter, six weeks later, it was hard to say goodbye. I remember trying not to show it, because I knew he didn\u2019t want to carry any weight as he moved through the world. When I began writing him letters full of news about my life in New York, I hesitated before typing \u201cLove\u201d above my name.<\/p>\n

We spent our last night together in Jack\u2019s cabin aboard the S.S. Slovenia. It was an experience he wanted me to have\u2014he knew I was afraid my life would never give me enough to write about, and he\u2019d been urging me to do some travelling of my own. The ship was still docked in Brooklyn, but I could feel the cabin gently rocking as the East River moved under us. Early the next morning, as I walked to the subway through the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Jack was on his way to Tangier, to visit William Burroughs. From there he would go to Paris, where he was thinking about living for the rest of his life.<\/p>\n

He\u2019d forgotten to pack his red-and-black shirt. I hung it in the closet, wondering if I\u2019d see him again. Three weeks later, I opened my mailbox and found a letter. \u201cWe had a tremendous storm 500 miles out & almost foundered,\u201d Jack wrote. He was currently eight miles off the coast of Africa, looking forward to landing in Tangier, \u201cthe Blue Pearl of the Hesperides\u2014the city of vice!<\/em>\u201d He told me that he\u2019d spent the voyage studying history and reading Kierkegaard in his cabin and that, since he hadn\u2019t been drinking, he was now the healthy Jack I\u2019d never known. \u201cWe\u2019ll meet again,\u201d he promised.<\/p>\n

In his next letter, he wrote about walking through the casbah, the \u201cwhanging music\u201d he heard, the caf\u00e9s where marijuana was smoked openly. It sounded like the kind of adventure he\u2019d imagined. But two weeks later he was wishing he hadn\u2019t come\u2014too many \u201cdull expatriate characters\u201d and \u201cnot too many good vibrations.\u201d \u201cLonely here,\u201d he wrote. \u201cDon\u2019t like whores anyway and no girls speak English.\u201d Had he forgotten to whom he was writing? Or was it that he felt there was nothing he couldn\u2019t tell me?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Before March was over, he\u2019d left for Paris. I wrote him twice, care of American Express. A month went by with no response. I kept telling myself not to wait for him, but I waited. One day near the end of April, I received a cable: Jack was on an ocean liner back to America and asked if he could stay with me. \u201cDoor wide open,\u201d I cabled back.<\/p>\n

A few days later, I gave him back his red-and-black shirt and learned that he was going to be with me for just a week: his new destination was California. He would pick up his mother in Florida, move her to the West Coast by Greyhound, and settle down for good with her in Berkeley. \u201cParis didn\u2019t want me,\u201d he said. The Parisians had made fun of his way of speaking French. I didn\u2019t understand why Jack\u2019s French was so important to him until I sat in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library forty years later, reading his notebooks. Having grown up when there was widespread prejudice against Franco-Americans, he had anguished feelings about his identity, a mixture of shame and pride that he kept to himself. M\u00e9m\u00e8re, I realized, had been the only one he could speak his kind of French with.<\/p>\n

If I felt like coming to San Francisco and getting a place in North Beach, he said, he\u2019d sneak in to see me all the time\u2014and M\u00e9m\u00e8re would cook me a nice dinner if I visited him in Berkeley. I almost went. In May, the editor-in-chief at Random House read the first fifty pages of my novel and unexpectedly offered me a contract. Suddenly I was due five hundred dollars, which I could live on for a while, I thought, until I found a job. Meanwhile, though, Jack\u2019s moods and plans kept changing. \u201cI\u2019m slowly being driven out of California,\u201d he wrote in mid-June, after he was stopped and questioned by the Berkeley police for taking a peaceful walk at midnight. In his next letter, he told me that he\u2019d been apprehensive since the police raided City Lights Bookstore and impounded all the copies of Ginsberg\u2019s \u201cHowl.\u201d Jack was worried now about what might happen when \u201cOn the Road\u201d came out, in September. He apologized for encouraging me to come to a state that \u201chas now fallen into the hands of Total Police Authority\u201d but said that maybe I\u2019d like it there anyway. \u201cAlways do what you want,\u201d he added, in a postscript, leaving me with much more freedom than I appreciated. \u201cDO WHAT YOU WANT.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

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A week later, he had a new thought: maybe I could go to Mexico with him. And by late July he\u2019d moved M\u00e9m\u00e8re back to Orlando and was on his way to Mexico City. On the twenty-eighth of that month, he wrote me from his \u201cearthquake-proof\u201d hotel, on Orizaba Street, after a devastating quake had levelled the buildings around him. He\u2019d thought he was experiencing the end of the world; having survived, he realized that he no longer wanted to be alone. \u201cSo come on down, I\u2019m waiting for you,\u201d he wrote. We\u2019d make love in his mirrored \u201cSultan\u2019s room,\u201d and dance the rumba and eat hot soup at market stalls and \u201cfloat on rafts of flowers,\u201d and when we grew tired of Mexico City we\u2019d spend a year in a quiet mountain village while \u201cOn the Road\u201d came out in America without him. It would be just the kind of novelist\u2019s education I\u2019d been looking for. \u201cI\u2019m lonesome for yr. friendship & love,\u201d he finally admitted. How could I not go to him?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I quit my job, gave up my apartment, and bought a plane ticket I never used\u2014a few days later, Jack caught the Asiatic flu and went back to Florida so that M\u00e9m\u00e8re could take care of him. On Labor Day weekend, a Greyhound bus brought him back to New York in time for the publication of \u201cOn the Road.\u201d<\/p>\n

I had just moved into a fourth-floor walkup in a brownstone on West Sixty-eighth Street. Late Sunday afternoon, I went to my window and there was Jack on the sidewalk, wearing a bright-blue Hawaiian shirt that he\u2019d bought in some Florida thrift shop, hoping it might bring him luck. \u201cWhat do you think?\u201d he asked. He was in a buoyant mood. I didn\u2019t have the heart to tell him that the orange palm trees on his shiny shirt were going to look a little weird on the streets of Manhattan.<\/p>\n

He was wearing that shirt at midnight when the two of us went to a newsstand on Broadway and stood under a street lamp reading the extraordinary review of \u201cOn the Road\u201d that had just come out in the Times<\/em>. It seemed as though the reviewer, Gilbert Millstein, was trying to preserve a measured tone but couldn\u2019t contain his excitement. Rereading it now, I can pick out the phrases that thrilled me seventy years ago: \u201chistoric occasion,\u201d \u201cauthentic work of art,\u201d \u201cthe most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important expression yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named as \u2018beat\u2019 and whose principal avatar he is.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s good, isn\u2019t it?\u201d Jack asked me. But he sounded subdued. His book was about to set off a culture war, and he was going to become the leading casualty of the Beat Generation. Maybe this was the fate he\u2019d been trying to avoid when he invited me to Mexico.<\/p>\n

Millstein threw a party for Jack that Friday, but, after five overwhelming days of instant fame, Jack couldn\u2019t bring himself to go. \u201cI don\u2019t know who I am anymore,\u201d I heard him tell his friend John Clellon Holmes, who had dropped by to see him. He\u2019d always dreamed of losing his anonymity; now that it had been swept away, along with the freedom of movement it had given him, he felt naked, and wanted to hide. He also wanted to live up to the moment, experience the interviews, the parties, the requests for readings, the swarms of women vying for his attention\u2014all of it. But since there had always been a deep shyness in him, the only way he could be the \u201cavatar\u201d of the Beat Generation was to drink. The day after Millstein\u2019s review, Viking Press had presented Jack with a case of champagne. He finished it and kept going.<\/p>\n

After his bouts of drinking, I always managed to get him safely up the four flights of stairs to the apartment, even when my heart was in my mouth, but I couldn\u2019t persuade him to turn off the world, though sometimes we tried. For a few days we\u2019d hole up together, pull down the blinds, try to ignore the ringing phone. Just as he started to recover a little, he\u2019d be drawn into the uproar again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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One night a photographer for Pageant<\/em> magazine followed Jack and me around Greenwich Village, from one old hangout of his to the next. There\u2019s a shot of us standing in Sheridan Square in front of a red neon bar sign. Jack\u2019s in the foreground forcing a grin; I\u2019m the girl with long blond hair dissolving into the darkness as she waits for the endless night to be over. Thirty-five years later, in 1993, I would be airbrushed out of the picture when the photo was used in an ad campaign by the Gap, with the slogan \u201cKerouac Wore Khakis.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jack wore his black-and-red shirt that fall, but it didn\u2019t help him feel more like himself. Since people were so used to seeing authors in tweed jackets, his lack of one, even on TV, may have contributed to the public\u2019s fascination with him\u2014and to the otherness they perceived, even in the sound of his unplaceable last name. But Jack\u2019s otherness also worked against him. One critic called him \u201ca slob running a temperature.\u201d And, in the brutal way that some members of the literary establishment attacked his writing, Jack may have heard echoes of the insulting stereotype that Franco-Americans were \u201cprimitive.\u201d<\/p>\n

One bright October weekend, we escaped upstate to Cherry Valley, where a friend of Jack\u2019s had a farmhouse. We took a long walk together under falling yellow leaves and found a meadow, where we stretched out on the warm dry grass. I had just drowsily closed my eyes when I heard Jack say, \u201cI know we should just stay up here and get married.\u201d In the silence that immediately dropped over us, I thought to myself that marrying him would be a disaster, but that I\u2019d marry him anyway if he asked me.<\/p>\n

In the spring, he kept an old promise to M\u00e9m\u00e8re and bought her a house in Northport, Long Island. Soon, he retreated there himself. He had been attacked and beaten outside a bar on MacDougal Street, and no longer felt like coming into the city. I had taken him to an emergency room that night, and he\u2019d been told that he had no concussion, despite the blows to his head. But the beating seemed to have broken something in him. The lifeless sentences in the penny postcards he sent me now and then could have been written by a stranger. In August, he offered me a book title that he said he no longer had any use for, since he\u2019d stopped writing the novel about his childhood that went with it. He\u2019d always had a phenomenal memory that he drew upon when he wrote, but the details he needed for this new book seemed to elude him.<\/p>\n

Once, he invited me to Northport to see him. \u201cWhat train are you going back on?\u201d M\u00e9m\u00e8re asked me, the moment she opened the front door. \u201cJewish bread,\u201d she said darkly, when I gave her a loaf of pumpernickel that Jack had told me to bring her. Ginsberg had told me that M\u00e9m\u00e8re had such a superstitious hatred of Jews that she called him the devil. Jack sent me a letter afterward telling me not to come to his home anymore\u2014he didn\u2019t want to \u201cdisturb the tender routines of what is after all an elderly lady.\u201d But he said he\u2019d see me in the fall. And he did visit then, three times, so drunk that he was as out of reach as he\u2019d been in Northport. I had aged over that long summer and was now twenty-three, old enough to know that I had to walk away.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I have no idea what became of Jack\u2019s red-and-black shirt. Was it among the stuff that got stored in his brother-in-law\u2019s barn, or had he discarded it? We all shed things as time moves us along; we shed people, even mountains. \u201cI still love her tonight,\u201d Jack would write, looking back on our affair in his 1965 novel \u201cDesolation Angels,\u201d in which I become Alyce Newman, \u201can interesting young person, a Jewess elegant middleclass sad and looking for something.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were certain things I could have saved but didn\u2019t. My Royal portable that Jack typed on whenever he stayed with me, the Lee Wiley record we used to play over and over again, the copy of \u201cEither\/Or\u201d that he was reading before he sailed to Tangier. I could have kept the pot in which I made him Lipton\u2019s pea soup, something he reminded me about during a late-night phone call in 1966, not long before I married someone else.<\/p>\n

I recently learned that there\u2019s a sheet of paper in Jacob Loewentheil\u2019s collection which I tossed away in April, 1957, right after Jack\u2019s return from Paris. On one side of it is a fragment of my first novel. I must have felt it had to be rewritten, even though Jack had been urging me never to stop to revise. He had apparently fished it out of my embarrassingly full wastepaper basket and typed a letter to his friend Ed White on the other side. He hated seeing paper wasted.<\/p>\n

The letters he sent me, typed or written right out to the edges of the page\u2014those I held on to. I intended to quote from them in the memoir I began writing forty years ago, before learning that all the words in them belonged to Jack\u2019s widow and could not be used without permission that she refused to give me. Only the pieces of paper Jack had written them on were mine.<\/p>\n

I xeroxed Jack\u2019s letters when I was fifty, then sold them to a dealer. I\u2019d just bought a small house on the edge of some woods in Vermont, and its well went dry every summer. I needed money for a new well, which would have to be drilled very deep, and for a room that I was adding. I felt Jack would have forgiven me\u2014he\u2019d often said that all he wanted for himself was a little mountain cabin. But words have mysterious properties; you can lose them in their tangible form and still keep them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I didn\u2019t know Jack had saved all my letters until his brother-in-law informed me that a Hollywood producer had given them to a famous director as a birthday present, along with the ones Jack had written to me. So we\u2019re together in Hollywood, as far as I know, along with Jack\u2019s raincoat, which was purchased by Johnny Depp. (The Kerouac I knew did not possess a raincoat.)<\/p>\n

The Berg Collection has some crutches that Jack used at Columbia, in October, 1940. They\u2019re preserved in the library\u2019s temperature-controlled precincts, together with a lock of Walt Whitman\u2019s hair, the surprisingly small wooden chair that Dickens sat on when he wrote, and other proof that legendary writers had actual lives. It may be that, like the crutches and the cigarette ashes, I, too, am part of Kerouac\u2019s realia: girl, blond, circa 1957-58. Though I couldn\u2019t be saved or collected, he left his imprint on me.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more What\u2019s Missing from Belle Burden\u2019s \u201cStrangers\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joyce Johnson writes about her affair with Jack Kerouac, whom she met on a blind date in New York before he published \u201cOn the Road.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":173,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-weekend-essay"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Gets Kept - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=174\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What Gets Kept - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Joyce Johnson writes about her affair with Jack Kerouac, whom she met on a blind date in New York before he published \u201cOn the Road.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=174\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-05-23T12:35:57+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"21 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=174#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=174\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"headline\":\"What Gets Kept\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-05-23T12:35:57+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=174\"},\"wordCount\":4295,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=174#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/05\\\/aab7d688a92e898febe2d6e092815221.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"The Weekend Essay\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=174#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=174\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=174\",\"name\":\"What Gets Kept - 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