In May, my friend Parker died suddenly, a few days after his 52nd birthday. I don’t know if I’ve ever been more shocked by someone’s death. He was the sort of person I fully expected to live well into his 90s. He was healthy, a runner, happily married, father to two girls, a person who seemed busy with work and family but still found time to volunteer in his community and enjoy hobbies. He read widely—everything from Dad-ish nonfiction to romance novels—and followed current events closely. As his obituary says, he was the sort of person “who could have an intelligent conversation about nearly anything.” The strangest aspect of his death, for me, was that even though I felt I knew him well, I had never met him in person.
Parker was an online friend, a member of a semi-private blogging community that goes back to the 1990s. It’s hard to explain, but it emerged from my college’s VAX server and then, when the server was retired, moved to a website. As students in the 1990s we used this hidden online space to leave messages for friends, share meaningful quotations, obliquely refer to crushes, announce that we were still awake, etc. Many continued to use it after graduation but then, as “real” social media arrived, most dropped it. Those who stayed or joined in the intervening years have become a very tight-knit community of around 200 people.
Parker was one of the most important members of this community. He noticed when someone new joined and welcomed them publicly. (There’s a way to link to other people, which involves light coding.) If you left and then came back after a few months, he’d welcome you publicly, alerting everyone to your presence. He responded to multiple posts every day. He also sent messages directly, offering advice, jokes, links, and stray thoughts.
When I looked back through my messages with Parker—which extend back to 2010—I was unnerved to see that our last exchange had been about a document he was preparing for his family in the event of his untimely death. These were instructions pertaining to maintenance tasks he’d taken on, ones he wasn’t sure anyone else knew how to do. (This document is mentioned in his obituary, so I feel it’s okay to share it here, in this letter.) Occasionally he would write about his updates to this odd instruction manual, and how it had grown over the years. The last time he posted about it, I sent him a direct message suggesting that he write about this document in a more public forum, maybe as the subject of a personal essay. I felt it was an unusual gesture of love and care. But, despite being a very entertaining diarist, Parker didn’t think of himself as a writer. And he was such an organized and practical person that he didn’t think there was anything special in keeping a bespoke instruction manual for his wife and children to inherit. To him it was common sense.
Whenever I think of Parker’s shocking death, I think of this instruction manual that he left behind. I wonder now if he was writing it mostly for himself, as a way of facing his mortality. I don’t mean to suggest that he knew he would die young, but certainly, in midlife, we all begin to realize—really understand—that our lives won’t continue indefinitely.
You opened this email thinking you were going to read about summer and here I am writing about death. Don’t worry: I’m going to pivot now. Parker’s death brought home to me the fact that the next few days, weeks, and years are not guaranteed. So, I resolved at the beginning of this summer to really squeeze the juice out of lemon. More bike rides. More swimming. More reading. More hammocks. More chatting with my kids. More petting my cats. More movies. More music.
Now, it’s the end of summer. My kids went back to school this week (hence time to write this letter) and this weekend is Labor Day, the official end. I will resist the temptation to grade myself on my lemon-squeezing. I did go for many bike rides—maybe not as many as I would have liked, but enough to discover some new routes. One day I went 30 miles, which is the longest bike ride I’ve gone on since I was a teenager. Gardening took up some of my biking time; I discovered the pleasure of weeding while listening to audiobooks. I planted sunflower seeds for the first time and gladiolus bulbs. My daughter and I did an exhaustive taste test of local soft ice cream spots. (Mainely Custard was the winner.) Mike learned some new BBQ recipes and perfected his homemade lobster rolls. We discovered a new drink, a Spaghett, at our local Italian restaurant. It’s basically a beer spritzer. You take a light beer (Peroni, Miller High Life) and add a shot of Aperol and a squeeze of lemon. It’s delicious. (You could make it with NA beer, too, to make it really light.)
I spent a fair amount of time indoors revising a novel, editing a short story (which will come out this fall), and writing posts for my Substack. I also wrote a review of a new documentary about Mary Oliver. I found it inspiring, the way Oliver built her life around writing poetry, and how she never lost her connection to the poets and subjects that made her want to write in the first place. I also enjoyed John Waters’ salty commentary throughout—he was a close friend of Oliver’s, one of her Provincetown buddies.
In August, my family went to Deer Isle, Maine. We’ve been to this part of the world many times. We visited our favorite spots and found some new ones, too. We saw a play at Stonington Opera House: Darker the Night, Brighter the Stars. It was written by John Cariani, a Maine native, and was a series of vignettes about young people from the northernmost part of Maine who were either returning to their hometown or about to leave. The cast was of course, very young, and after we saw the play on opening night, we kept noticing them around town—their youthful clothing and hairstyles made them stand out. (Also, Stonington is a very small town.) Once they were all hanging out at the beach right near where we were staying. My son was mildly star stuck as we chatted with them. They told us that they had come up from New York for the summer, to put on the show. I felt very nostalgic, talking to them. (I also thought that five young New Yorkers descending on a sleepy Maine fishing village to put on a play would make a great premise for a movie.)
We ventured off the island to see a classical music program at Kneisel Hall, a summer school in Blue Hill for chamber musicians. The performance we attended was put on by the teachers, and held in a wood-paneled pavilion with a screened-in porch that allowed listeners to take in the music from the side yard, if they wished. I stayed inside but my kids went outside after intermission. I was awed the musicians’ intense focus, as well as the pavilion itself, whose wooden ceiling and walls seemed to take in the music and glow with it.
On a lighter, sillier, note, we went to visit Nervous Nellie’s Jams & Jellies, where you can buy homemade jam and walk through a whimsical and ever-growing sculpture garden/village made by artist Peter Beerits. The sculptures, which are inspired by local flora and fauna as well as fairy tales, myth, and history, are all made from junkyard materials: old tires, cars, furniture, spare parts, etc. After years of visiting, we decided to buy one for our garden. We selected a turkey whose tail feathers are made from the wooden hammers inside of a piano. We chose it because 1) we liked the musical reference in the materials and 2) we have two turkey families that regularly wander through our neighborhood.
I will leave you with a photo of our turkey, who now resides in a place where I can see him from the kitchen window. After the turkey, you’ll find links below to things I’ve been writing, reading, listening to, and watching.
-Hannah
Inspired by this documentary mini-series, Mike and I have been making our way through all of Martin Scorsese’s movies. We just finished Raging Bull.
My neighbor Bill Hedden made On Common Ground, an essential podcast about the Trump administration’s efforts to sell and lease public lands and what we can do to protect them.
Of course I had to listen to Anne Lamott on Amy Poehler’s podcast, Good Hang. At the beginning of every episode, Amy calls up a celebrity friend to help her come up with questions to ask her guest. For Lamott, she consulted Tina Fey, who shared a delightful game to play with Lamott, which has turned into one of our family’s favorite roadtrip/hiking games. I won’t try to explain—just listen to the first part of the pod and let Tina explain.
I have a short story, “The Department of Home Economics,” coming out in The Common this fall. Subscribe now to get it hot off the press!
In October, I will be the provider of Qs at a Q & A with debut author Mindy Misener, who novel, Good Guys will be published October 13. Come out and meet her!
If for some reason you’d like to hear from me more often, I write a newsletter on substack called Thelma & Alice, where I write about the movies and books I’m reading. I’d love to see you over there
