I’m a novelist who spends a lot of my time thinking about time. The success of my books is dependent, in part, on how deftly I can manage this most precious of commodities. In fiction, time is flexible, and if I manipulate it carefully, my story’s pacing is neither too fast nor too slow. So, how is it that I don’t have a better handle on where the last 18 years have gone?
The woman’s name was Jeanne Manford, and she was marching alongside her twenty-one-year-old gay son, Morty. Moved by the outpouring of emotion, the two of them discussed it all along the route. By the time they reached Central Park, they had also reached a decision: if so many people wished that someone like Jeanne could talk to their parents, why not make that possible? The organization they dreamed up that day, which started as a single support group in Manhattan, was initially called Parents of Gays; later, it was renamed Parents FLAG, for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays; nowadays, it is known only as PFLAG. Just a handful of people attended its first meeting, held fifty years ago this spring. Today, it has four hundred chapters and well north of a quarter of a million members.
Like any global capital, Rome stays open late, as young (and young-at-heart) locals buzz about the city’s many restaurants and bars. At the same time, the city’s diligent baking workforce arrives at their bakeries early in the morning to prep the day’s offerings. It was only a matter of time until these two groups overlapped, creating a late-night market for early-morning treats.
All travel books are by their very nature dated. That’s their fault, that they’re old-fangled; and it’s their virtue, that they preserve something of the past that would otherwise be lost.
There’s a melancholy that underpins a lot of Thirst for Salt, a sense of loss, but also of missed opportunities and lives not lived. Lucas leaves her readers, quietly, in this moment of reflection, where the possibilities of past and future stretch endlessly across the horizon.
Null. All. What’s after death or before.
Where my old dog is now, my mother,
my father—not the ashes clumped