a jazz duo is not a death sentence
This is a SECRET SOCIETY
Good evening, whenever you are.
It’s not evening where I am, which is in the lobby of the hotel where we are staying this weekend.
K arrives later this evening, and later still some of our parents will get here. Our son and his girlfriend are taking an overnight train from Savannah and will arrive tomorrow. It’s a ceremonial, slow invasion of New Haven, CT because on Monday our daughter graduates from college.
And since I am here first, in a city I once lived in when I was young, and since on Tuesday I will leave last, along with our daughter, and we will both say good bye to this very real place that already feels like a dream, and since 4 years is apparently 4 seconds now, and time has no meaning, yes I will have a drink in the hotel lobby at 3:33PM, which is what time it is now.
I was going to write to you from the library. I had planned to get up early, drive to New Haven, and spend all day there. It’s what I’ve wanted and looked forward to ever since they re-opened that reading room I love. Living in the past.
But I have a present day life, a column to write this morning, a gym to go to (I am not solely made of hotel lobby style indulgence), long conversations to have about THE FALL GUY and LETTERKENNY, and a general sense that a 52 year old man parked in a university library reading room, working on his substack, is not a good look, but a sad, dad, and desperate look, I instead took my time today, and thus, ran out of it.
I might go by the library tomorrow. I might take more pictures of the notes hidden in the old card catalogues drawers. I might sneak a copy of VACATIONLAND in to the bookshelf as a pitiable reminder that I was here, once, then and now.
Or, in the interest of being in the present (the only version of time that is not fantasy), I might not do those things. I might do something else. I’ll decide. I guess you’ll find out in my next letter.
But I promised you more details of the drive south K and I took at the end of April to visit our son in Savannah (another slow approach, time-extending and strange, but not quite as evocative and midnight-y as a slow train north from Georgia).
So to keep my promise I will take you as far as Myrtle Beach this time, and we will see where we get together from there.
When we finally arrived, unpacked, and got down to the lounge at the beach hotel, there was a jazz duo playing. This sounds like a death sentence, but it wasn’t.
