Category Archives: General

It was a strangely sympathetic thing for him to say, and we stood there in a sudden, not uncomfortable silence. Men sometimes make friends this way, I think. They decide quickly… There was something vulnerable and temporary about the moment, and I was attentive to it, for a man, let us agree, is a kind of shelled animal. There is the hardened surface he presents to the world, the face and the words and the behavior, but very often these do not correlate very well with the being inside the shell. By hardened I mean coherent, deflective of attack, and capable of being recognized by others; I don’t mean unchangeable – quite the opposite, in fact. But the shell is always there, growing outward from within, flaking and breaking away, and the quivering wet stuff inside remains largely hidden. Appearances are not deceiving so much as incomplete. What you see is what you get, but what you don’t see is also what you get.

~ Colin Harrison

“I thought I recognized in him a certain kind of man, a man who is damaged and yet unflinching. I’ve met a few. Because he has taken pain, such a man knows he can take more. In fact, he expects it; suffering, so far as he sees, is in the order of things, the logic of the universe. Usually such men are hard, even self-punishing workers, capable of long periods of isolation or aloneness, and suffer bouts of crippling melancholy. They refuse to take antidepressants, they refuse to talk too much; instead they wait and wait, with the patience of a cat, for the mood to turn. They drink coffee alone in the morning, they smoke cigarettes on the porch… Such men believe in luck, they watch for signs, and they conduct private rituals that structure their despair and mark their waiting. They are relatively easy to recognize but hard to know, especially during the years when a man is most dangerous to himself, which begins at about age thirty-five, when he starts to tally his losses as well as his wins, and ends at about fifty, when, if he has not destroyed himself, he has learned that the force of time is better caught softly, and in small pieces. Between those points, however, he’d better watch out, better guard against the dangerous journey that beckons to him – the siege, the quest, the grandiosity, the dream. Yes, let me say it again. Quiet men with dreams can be dangerous.”

~ Colin Harrison, ‘The Havana Room’

A sudden rush of wind. A startling drop in temperature. The darkening of sky.

I stand at the edge of the pool, gazing up at the top of a grand oak tree. The very first pulse of the storm travels through its boughs, the silver undersides of the leaves twisting and screaming in the wind. Then the delayed arrival of debris and bark, needles from the neighboring pines, falling through that great expanse of dim sky. And then the rain drops, light and few at first, then gathering into torrents ruthlessly thrust by the backing wind.

The deluge is swift, the amount of water the air has held is immense. It is no longer safe to be outside.

Back in the kitchen, the rain beats relentlessly against a skylight. I slide a tray of red potatoes and Brussels sprouts into the oven for roasting. Andy managed to grill the tuna in advance of the storm. I took down the patio awning a few hours ago, and just like that our summer has gone away. The lights are blinking now, the weather advisories are beeping across Andy’s television in the other room. The sky bleeds into night hours before it should.

I never thought it would come this quickly.

It’s never been a secret in my small world that I’m not a big Barbra Streisand fan. I’m certainly no hater, and I have always appreciated her vocal gifts – it’s just not my style, and I’ve never connected with her like I have with other, less gifted singers. When friends started posted the above song from her new album of unreleased tracks, I sighed and begrudgingly gave it a listen. To my surprise, I was moved by the simple rendition of this quietly powerful song. I offer it here for the final stretch of summer. Fall is already in the air, having crept into the nights for some time now, and it’s a moment of reflection, ripe for a song like this.