I keep waiting for snow to fall in the northeast. It has done so in Montreal, but New England and New York have been dry and unseasonably several degrees above freezing. Brilliant sunshine today in Boston. I had been up very early, finishing a television commission (I sleep little these days), and kept writing in my hotel room (bar an hour in the gym) until I had to dash to South Station and the train to New York. At which point it only dawned on me: it is truly a beautiful day outside. A clear pellucid sky. Hard winter sun. An edgy nip to the air. And having been shut in all day I was too preoccupied to notice it. But I had a great conversation with the cab driver on the way to the train station. He told me he was sixty-four, widowed for twenty years, and had brought up his kids himself (they were both in their twenties now, one out in the world working as a teacher, the other still trying to find myself, but a little lost about his place in the world). Since his wife’s death he’d never remarried, but there was always a girlfriend. And every February he spent a month in the Dominician Republic, living cheap, hanging out with assorted femmes, soaking in the tropical sun and torpor as the rest of Boston froze. The man had - while driving a cab - worked out a way of making his life interesting... and had a decidedly existential perspective on human endeavor. What a mensch!, I thought as I walked to my train. As I always tell younger writers: asks questions of others. Every life is a novel, and you learn so much if you can get away from your own preoccupations and find interest in the stories of others.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 20:25:49 +0000
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