I like winter better than summer. Always have. Winter demands an urgency and seriousness of purpose that Summer cannot – and does not want to – match. People walk a little faster when it’s cold outside. They involuntarily hunch their
I like winter better than summer. Always have. Winter demands an urgency and seriousness of purpose that Summer cannot – and does not want to – match.
People walk a little faster when it’s cold outside. They involuntarily hunch their shoulders and set their gaze directly ahead and take the most direct route to wherever they’re going. You do not loll when you might freeze to death.
But I’ve never been a loller. I prefer the bustle of winter to the languidness of summer. I’d rather stride than stroll. Shiver than sweat. Bundle up than strip down.
Winter doesn’t allow any time to waste. It doles out daylight in tiny doses, making the daytime all the more precious. Summer, the lazy bastard, dumps it out freely, giving the misimpression that there’s plenty of time to do everything. In the winter, you get where you’re going. In the summer, you take the long way home.
Winter is “Hurry up!” Summer is “Are we there yet?” In the winter, you have to keep moving to keep warm, so you get things done. In the summer, it’s too hot to go fast, so you slow down.
I don’t like it.
I’ll take a blizzard over a hurricane, a flurry over a sunshower, dry over muggy.
When it’s cold, you can put on a sweater and be fine. When it’s colder, you can put on a parka (I recommend L.L. Bean’s Maine Warden’s Parka) and be fine. There’s always something else: flannel-lined jeans, PrimaLoft boots…something. But when it’s hot, there’s only so much you can take off. I like the coziness of winter, the way the cold air feels on my face and in my lungs. I like the way the short days remind me how valuable time is. Today, the shortest day of the year – or is it the longest night? – is the first day of winter. The final season of this wretched year and the first of the next year, which beckons with promise and hope. It’ll be cool in my beloved Maine today – the high in Portland is 34. In my new hometown of West Hollywood, it’ll get up to 81 (which Mainers refer to as “summer”), although it’ll tumble to 48 (which Mainers refer to as “summer”) later in the day.
I’m neither place today, although I’m thinking of both. Of course, I’m thinking of you, and wishing you a joyous, productive winter.
I would have liked to have been born in my beloved Maine, but to paraphrase a friend, my mother was in Miami at the time, and I thought I should be with her for that particular event. So I grew
I would have liked to have been born in my beloved Maine, but to paraphrase a friend, my mother was in Miami at the time, and I thought I should be with her for that particular event.
So I grew up in Miami, donning sweaters when it was 65 degrees and ski jackets – we didn’t know of parkas – at 60. To me, snow seemed exotic. In Miami in the 1970s (I’m old. Shut up.), the elementary school English textbook was called The Roberts English Series. The first poem in the first of the series – at least the first that I remember – was Robert Frost’s magnificent Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. I memorized it immediately. Someone had told me that poetry wasn’t to be taken literally, so at 7 or 8 years old, I decided that poem was about death.
It’s been a long time since I was 8, and I now like to think the poem isn’t about death so much as it is about, y’know, stopping by woods on a snowy evening. I picture the woods in Maine, even though Frost published the poem in his New Hampshire collection. Even Frost couldn’t get everything right.
I lived in Maine long enough for it to seep into my soul, and I plan to return one day. I cannot call myself a Mainer, although perhaps my friend Janet, who has impeccable Maine credentials and whose wonderful family embraces and embodies all that is good about the state, wouldn’t mind if I considered myself at least an honorary Mainer.
My years in Maine made me reconsider snow. It is no longer exotic, but it’s still magic.Winter, which toughens Mainers and brings them together, fortified by Leon Leonwood Bean’s boots against a common adversary, begins today, the solstice. Frost, of course, phrased it more elegantly: “The darkest evening of the year.”
Here’s to the magic of this season, wherever you experience it.
Back in Maine – my beloved Maine – is a bar where I used to drink. It’s called Amigos because it purports to be a Mexican restaurant. Word is, there’s a dining room upstairs, but everyone in Portland knows that
Back in Maine – my beloved Maine – is a bar where I used to drink. It’s called Amigos because it purports to be a Mexican restaurant. Word is, there’s a dining room upstairs, but everyone in Portland knows that downstairs, through the door marked “BAR ROOM” in cheap, somehow menacing adhesive letters, is a serious drinkhouse.
It’s perfect. Cheap drinks, a pinball machine, two dartboards (which I was prohibited from using – more because of the darts than the boards), and an adequate sound system playing great music: Alice in Chains, Johnny Cash, Social Distortion, Nirvana, Screaming Trees, Sinatra, the Rolling Stones, Tool, and Soundgarden.
When I hear those bands, I’m back at Amigos.
Unlike anything else, except maybe scent, music has the power to transport people across decades and miles. Hear a song you used to listen to in high school, and, for a tiny moment, you’re there again.
Music is transcendent that way. Soundgarden recorded Fell on Black Days in 1993, when Chris Cornell was 29. He sang into a machine which captured the moment – a moment – and ultimately distributed it around the world.
Machines shouldn’t be able to preserve the power and beauty that Cornell produced but, magically, they did.
Even more magically, hearing a few seconds of sound transports me back in time and delivers me to a barstool in Maine. I can smell Amigos, which is not always a blessing, and I can see my friends there, which always is.
Some of them, like Cornell, are gone now, but in brief moments that wash over me with sound, they live.
