My local shopping center inspired the poet Ed Ochester to name one of his books after it. Or rather, the stretch of road it's on. This stretch of road was known as a major passing-through area, as a lot of older people used to tell me, and in old photos you'll see motel after motel after motel. It was a stopping place for traveling salesmen and long-haul truck drivers.

The Miracle Mile -- by Ed Ochester -- contains a short poem named "Monroeville, Pa." (I grew up there.) It's a couple of sentences saying basically, "I was in Monroeville, and a kid yelled, 'Hey asshole,' one day and every single person on the street turned around."

Ochester taught at Pitt and I took his class. Then I read this book and found that poem. Some years back I guess things here seemed pretty materialistic: The town had become ultra whitebread, very commerce-minded; its huge indoor mall with an iceskating rink inside it, so nice for the time that JoJo Starbuck (Terry Bradshaw's first wife) used to practice on it. You could count the number of minorities living there on your fingers, and the majority of residents were prosperous. Maybe it appeared to others more tacky than I realized. Anyway I wrote a response and handed it in:

We were in Monroeville, Pa. one day

When a small child shouted, 'Hey, asshole!' on the street.

We had never seen an asshole before.

We all turned around.

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A friend in Pittsburgh had another memory for the name. He laughed and said "the Miracle Mile" was what he and other soldiers called a stretch of road in Vietnam, that ran between where the soldiers' base and the closest village. Prostitutes, he said, stood like lampposts all along this mile of road, waiting for the soldiers.

And I'm sure there are lots of other uses of the name.