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I took Michelle to dinner in Port Washington and she told me about her husband, Mike Lunden, an energy broker who loved bow ties and cigars and hockey and weddings and Chicago and fine wines—and her. She described their courtship and happy marriage. Though they lived in a studio apartment with a newborn baby, she said, they never once got sick of each other. As Michelle talked I noticed that she was yet another graduate of the Publicans Storytelling Academy. She had me laughing one minute, swallowing a lump in my throat the next. She asked about me. Had I gotten married? I told her I’d come close once or twice, but I’d had some growing up to do first. Also, it had taken me a long time to get over my first love. “Right,” she said. “What ever happened to—?” “Sidney.” I cleared my throat. “She phoned me out of the blue when she heard I was at Harvard. We met for dinner.” “And?” “She was exactly the same.” “And?” “I’d changed.” Sidney had explained, carefully and honestly, her decision not to choose me years before, saying she’d been apprehensive about a young man so enthralled by a bar. I told Michelle I thought Sidney had been right to be apprehensive. After dinner I took Michelle for a nightcap to the site of the old Publicans. We sat in the booth nearest the door and I could see Michelle’s spirits lift, ever so slightly, as good memories drifted back. But her thoughts quickly returned to her husband. He was such a good man, she told me, repeating those words, “a good man,” several times. And he was thrilled about Matthew, she said. Now Matthew would know Mike only through letters and photos and stories. She worried about her son growing up with no father, how that void would define him. “At least he’ll have his uncles,” she said with a sigh. “And his cousins. He’s crazy about his cousins. And in school he’ll know many other children who lost fathers, so he won’t feel—different.” I slumped against the back of the booth. It hadn’t hit me until then. Manhasset, where I’d once felt like the only boy without a father, was now a town full of fatherless children.
The Tender Bar
J.R. Moehringer
Dr. Maffetone told me my problem was due to adrenal stress caused by too much “anaerobic” training. At first I was skeptical, but Dr. Maffetone had me go to the nearest track and run a mile with a heart-rate monitor set to my aerobic threshold. I was shocked to see that I could not run a mile under eleven minutes aerobically: this was unbelievable given the fact that twelve months prior I had run over twenty-six miles consecutively at an average pace per mile of 5:48!
The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing
Philip Maffetone and Mark Allen
Every rehearsal began with a “noise jam,” which became a sort of improvisational exercise in dynamics, ultimately honing our collective instinct and making it so that song structure didn’t necessarily need to be verbally arranged; it would just happen, almost the way a flock of blackbirds gracefully ebbs and flows in a hypnotic wave over a country field in the winter. This method was instrumental in the quiet/loud dynamic that we became known for, though we hardly invented it. That credit was due to our heroes the Pixies, who were hugely influential to us. We had adopted their simple trademark in more than a few of our new songs: tight, simple verses that explode into giant, screaming choruses. A sonic juxtaposition with ferocious results, most notably “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
The Storyteller
Dave Grohl
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