mallorys_camera | Jackie Kennedy in Poughkeepsie and Paris

Poughkeepsie is a Leonard Cohen kinda town. Meaning that though there's a fair amount of garbage here, there are also some flowers, and if you have anything of the gardener in your soul, you wander around wondering if there is some way to cultivate the blossoms.

I'm in major processing mode, and still somewhat in shock and (yes) denial that I can actually enjoy myself doing nothing more than reading books, watching movies, playing video games, going for long walks and hanging out with the cats.

I should be writing, right? Bearing testimony. Explaining myself to the Universe.

And what about intimacy? What about hanging out with other people?

Apparently I get all my needs for random socialization met at the office.

There are specific people I want to see, and I'll be seeing several of them in the next couple of weeks.

Other than that – phhht. Fuck other people. I've even stopped playing my favorite crowd game, that pretend-you're-telepathic-and-cast-your-mind-out-in-the-vast-sea-of-chance-and-see-what-random-stranger-turns-around-and-smiles-at-you game.

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Before I came here, my only association with Poughkeepsie was Vassar College, Jackie Kennedy's alma mater, one of the upscale Seven Sisters colleges originally chartered in the 1860s so that women could have educational opportunities equal to those provided to men. Vassar isn't actually in Poughkeepsie, though, or rather – Vassar is in Poughkeepsie town but not Poughkeepsie city. (I don't actually understand the weird distinction New York state makes between cities, towns, villages, and no, I don't want it explained to me.)

I keep an eye out for Jackie Bouvier's ghost as I wander around the city, but it seems unlikely we'll ever stumble across one another. In 1947 when Jackie was a Vassar freshman, Poughkeepsie was Everytown, USA, the town in the parade photo above. Jackie had little or no use for Everytown, USA: Jackie was an even bigger snob back then than she evolved into later on as Jackie O.

Above all else, Jackie was a pragmatist and opportunist, so she looked at Vassar solely as a way station to fuel her dreams of living in post-war Paris. Junior year abroad and all of that, dontcha know.

You have to imagine Jackie as the Jean Seberg character in Godard's Breathless, a beautiful opportunist learning French vocabulary words from gangsters: Qu'est-ce que c'est, "dégueulasse"? Clearly she was running away from something that was preordained. As the older, smarter, less histrionic daughter of the ruthlessly ambitious Janet Lee, she was expected to make a spectacular marriage – and, of course, she did: She fully understood she was trapped in an Edith Wharton novel, that her destiny was big houses and marriage plots. And yet, and yet, and yet...

In 1949, Jackie was 20. She lived with an impoverished countess on L'avenue Mozart in the 16th Arrondisement. She was issued a ration card soon after she arrived. Although Jackie had the usual misadventures with footprint toilets and a lack of wintertime central heating, she also had her social connections. She spent equal amounts of time in Left Bank cafes and at the Ritz where visiting friends of her stepfather would take her to fatten her up. She had one fur coat reserved for these occasions.

Afterwards, she described that year in Paris as a foreign exchange student as the happiest in her life. She said it was because she was completely "carefree." Throughout the rest of her life she was plenty careless as all immensely rich people can afford to be, but I don't think she was ever carefree again.

I'd been in Poughkeepsie a month, and I still hadn't seen Vassar, so I wandered down that way yesterday in between thunderstorms. Disappointing. I'd been imagining a bustling little avenue of cool coffee houses, record stores, bookshops and hookah bars like Collegetown in Ithaca or Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, but all I found was half a block of mostly vacant storefronts, the ghosts of dead smoothie bars. I parked myself in the only cafe, sipped cappuccino, listened to some sleek pampered girlies prattle about the Guido menace -- I kid you not! Ethnic bias is apparently on the rise among the spawn of America's wealthiest – finished John Sandford's Silken Prey (he phoned that one in) and generally felt underwhelmed. I suppose one might argue that at the age of 61, I am way too old to hang out in cafes, but that in fact has always been one of my favorite pastimes. In Paris, I wouldn't be too old to hang out in cafes. Hell, in Berkeley, I wouldn't be too old to hang out in cafes.

Trotted home. Empty streets. Looming storm clouds. Hundred percent humidity. My skin was covered with a luminous sheen of sweat. I felt like a translucent porcelain teacup.

When I got home, the weather finally broke in an enormous thunderstorm, bringing the temperature down 15 degrees. I slept through the night for the first time in three days. Almost slept through the night. Around one in the morning -- ten his time-- Max texted me: Milo was a Plott hound! No, Max, Milo was not a Plott hound. I saw Milo's mother at the ASPCA when we adopted him -- she was definitely a Blue Lacy. When she got knocked up through the artifices of some rapscallion hound, her human owner packed her up and sent her off to the Home For Unbred Canines.

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Vassar College was founded by a renegade brewmeister named Matthew Vassar. Vassar didn't have any kind of idealistic commitment to female education. He wanted to be famous, remembered after his death, and he hit upon the idea of establishing a woman's college as his vehicle for immortality. He lobbied the New York State legislature hard to establish a college, and in 1861, presented the college's newly formed Board of Trustees with a deed to 200 acres of land approximately two miles outside the city of Poughkeepsie proper and a tin box containing $408,000 – roughly the equivalent of ten million dollars today.

Thereafter, the Vassar Board of trustees became his own personal congregation. He hectored them with long implausible rants whenever he was in the mood, and in 1868, actually dropped dead on the 11th page of the farewell speech he was delivering to them. Perfect timing.

Jackie Kennedy didn't spend very much time at Vassar when she wasn't in class. Practically every weekend, she escaped Poughkeepsie, hopped the train to Manhattan to her father's apartment. She often brought along girlfriends whom she would pimp out guilelessly and platonically. She loved watching the effect her devastatingly handsome and charismatic father had on women of all ages. Throughout her life, Jackie was always learning new vocabulary words and watching the havoc that the charismatic people who gravitated into her life had on the world outside her charmed circle. Jackie was more of an agente provacateuse than a gardener.