Happy Thanksgiving!
A short story on the nature of gifts, thoughts on being a baby.
It Was a Summer Night
It was a summer night in 1986, I was at a small-town pizza parlor packed with people, filled with voices and laughter and seventies rock music. The air outside had been weirdly humid all afternoon, presaging rain, but we were all surprised when a roll of thunder rattled the windows. There was a flash, and the power went out — but only partially. The lights and music conked off immediately, but for some reason the jukeboxes and pinball machines stayed on, so the restaurant was bathed in a weird glow of blues and pinks and reds and greens. The room fell quiet, and then some girls shrieked with a wild, scared laughter, but the laughter fell away.
There in the glow we looked outside and watched the rain come avalanching down suddenly, as if a big bucket in the sky had been tipped over.
There were more flashes of lightning, and more thunder, and a kind of hush came over all of us, and I remember looking at the faces of my friends peering out the window in the hypnagogic light, and I thought to myself that this moment would never repeat itself, we would never have this strange night again, would never be so young again, would never be bathed in the glow of neon and lightning and sheets of summer rain ever quite like this again. It was a gift, undeserved. Like all the gifts in life are.
OUR TREE
An ambient song, featuring the birds in the big Douglas fir that towers over my home:
If you like this newsletter, please do tell a friend. And if you want more, may I humbly recommend to you my first novel, The Forest Museum.
