Aug. 4, 2020
Hurricane Isaias is careening through Baltimore right now, and I remember that there are good storms that embolden and excite. For a brief moment in 2005 I lived at a friend’s house in New Orleans’ Mid-City neighborhood not far from S. Jefferson Davis Highway near Finn McCool’s Irish bar. It was a rare two-story shotgun-style house, with a second apartment and parking pad underneath, and I was subletting it while my friend traveled to Tennessee. That July Hurricanes Cindy and Dennis hit the city, two concentrated, impactful storms forgotten in the wake of bigger events. They arrived at night, their tropical winds and warm rains caressing the shotgun homes and corner bars where people threw the last of the great hurricane parties, soaked in Dixie beer and Jack Daniel’s, and on those evenings the New Orleans sky was emblazoned with the purple light of electric transformers exploding across the city landscape. Then, later, Katrina hit and brought hell with it and you realize that, like Werner Herzog said, nature can be vile.
July 29, 2020
It’s 100 degrees and the sun’s set but I’m still sweating through my shirt. The Orioles game is playing on the radio while I sit on my front porch, and there are more people outside than usual because the world is crashing around us. They’re walking dogs and racing scooters and I remember when this was normal, before air conditioners were ubiquitous and neighbors would sit on their porches and you could catch an entire O’s pitch sequence walking down a city block. Those were nights when my brother and I would huddle on the floor of our parent’s room because we only owned one air conditioner so we’d lay on cushions and fall asleep to the hum of electric comfort.
July 28, 2020
Birdland Schadenfreude: In lieu of this week’s games being “postponed” due to COVID, I submit “stuff you remember as a long suffering Orioles fan.” Aug 16, 2003 – Human Gold’s Gym Jack Cust beats a Yankee rundown on what would have been the game-tying run, only to fall flat on his face inches from home plate. As was his tradition, manager Mike Hargove watched the play then pulled another shot of gin from the “special” Gatorade cooler.
July 22, 2018 ·
Late evening summer thunderstorms remind me of my grandfather, the late Dr. William H. Shannon. We’d visit Trusty Friend, the family’s Italianate farmhouse located just south of the city, on humid summer days, looking for relief from the bubbling city heat. As the sun descended, the family would sit on the front porch, kids on the floor, aunts and uncles in plastic chairs, my grandmother in a rocker. Grandad would lean against a white porch column, wearing light summer slacks and a crumpled short-sleeve button down shirt, a bow tie tucked under his chin, his feet stuffed in a pair of bone white loafers, his hair the color and peak of whipped egg whites.
From his pocket he’d pop out an unfiltered Pall Mall from a soft pack and light it. Like clockwork, summer thunderstorms would roll through central Maryland, and the sky would slip into a deep blue hue, then open wide, heaving rain that pelted the leaves of the three dozen white oak trees towering throughout the property’s front grove. Thunder rumbled overhead, Rip Van Winkle thunder, echoing off the mountainous clouds that concealed the bearded men throwing strikes in a primeval game of nine-pins, as Grandad would tell us.
Later, he’d finish his cigarette, the embers burning crimson in his fingertips, and flip the butt into the front gravel driveway. His cough was amplified by thunderheads peeling violently above the creaking oaks, and his profile illuminated in lighting strikes.
May 20, 2018 ·
Late Spring Evening
I ordered two fried soft shell crabs from the seafood market, took them home, cut up tomatoes and cucumbers, toasted a couple slices of whole wheat, grilled the rest of the asparagus and made sandwiches. It was a perfect Maryland evening, warm and sleepy in late evening sun. Afterward I set up in my yard among the peonies and roses, and the wild thyme in bloom, and smoked an Arturo Fuente anejo and drank a tequila blanco and lime.
Earlier in the day I sat high over Annapolis, high enough to see the boats floating along the Severn, and the bone white cupola of the state’s capital glazed in noon sunshine. I watched as young men’s youth passed before them. I mulled over the dead in Santa Fe, the dead in Baltimore, the dead like Christopher Clarke and Devin Cook and Ray Glasgow III. I thought of America at this stark, cruel tenure. I thought of my wedding day, and the bright colors and bright faces and hard dancing in the neon. I remembered the day before when the slop splashed up from Pimlico, as Justify squeezed out the Preakness by a neck, chest throbbing, legs pounding through the mud, his victory lost in fog, just an animal doing his master’s bidding.
Victory, agony, acceptance, defeat.
Back in the city, the smoke from my anejo twirled skyward toward the alley streetlight. A handful of ancient stars poked through the black haze. I decided I wanted to read more Tolstoy, but really I’d rather just swim forever in this particular night’s blankness.
March 11, 2018 ·
Bad Nana took the day’s single Allowance race, nosing out Dorthyfromdublin for the Win. I missed my $4 exacta box by a length when the 2X horse Fleur de Force fell to Show, but the Arturo Fuente Gran Reserva smoked rich and oily in the late winter sun so it wasn’t a total loss. I took sanctuary inside the club house, passing a collection of jockeys’ wives who spoke quietly in Spanish to their toddlers while they patiently awaited their husbands.
