Sharing the Scranton, PA, references I stumble upon in pop culture and the arts has become a hobby of mine since we used to track such mentions at the (now defunct) electric city weekly newspaper long before The Office came to town.

After years of reading Lorrie Moore’s “How to Become a Writer” with my students, I finally got around to the rest of the author’s magnificent short story collection Self-Help (1995) last week. I was shocked to discover the prominent role Scranton plays in “To Fill.” In this story set in Philadelphia, “Scranton” comes to represent Tom’s affair. He uses the name of the city to refer to his mistress, rather than sully her given name, Julia. The other woman, we eventually learn, is a poet who works as a teacher in Scranton. “Scranton” soon becomes a dirty word in the mouth of our narrator, Tom’s wife Riva. The city’s name is henceforth equated with rejection and betrayal.

Here is the first mention.

“The woman in the health food store, I believe, is slowly losing her mind. Every time I go in there, she is slumped on the wooden stool behind the register more dazed, more sad than before. She recognizes me less.

Today, I am the only one in there and when I say, ‘Excuse me. Can I get two pounds of bulgar wheat?’ she continues to stare at the coconut shampoos, her legs frozen in cross, her back a curved mound beneath the same pink-grey sweater she drapes like a small cape over her shoulders. Finally, she says, ‘Huh?,’ but never looks up.

‘Bulgar wheat,” I say gently. ‘Coarse. Like last week?’

‘Yeah,’ she pulls at the sweater then goes through some sort of pelvic swivel which tilts the stool just enough to spill her down and out of it.

She scuffs around the counter to the bulgar wheat, reaches for a scoop, a paper bag, and then bursts into sobs. I try to think of what to do. I quickly grab three coconut shampoos to help out her business a little and then go to her, put my arm around her and tell her about Tom’s secret affair last year in Scranton. And how I visited him there as a surprise and learned of the whole thing and got drunk and stuck postage stamps all over myself and tried to mail myself home. That always cheers people up when I tell it in “Scarves and Handbags.”

She smiles, shuffles over to the register, charges me for four, not three, coconut shampoos, and the bulgar wheat.”

-excerpt from “To Fill” by Lorrie Moore.