It’s been a busy week: a Labor Day drive down to Princeton to meet up with one of my best friends for lunch, a trip to Boston for a healthcare investor conference on Tuesday (where I stayed with another good friend in Worcester), a couple of late evenings in NYC (Thursday for a fiction reading by Adam Haslett, and Friday for a reading of The Designated Mourner by my buddy, John Castro), and now a party to celebrate a friend’s elopement.
There were a bunch of high points, including the moment of manic, mantic fire leaping from my pen as the idea for a novel struck me during lunch at PF Chang’s near Boston Common. More on that as it evolves.
But the peak, at least physically, had to be when I got back to the Four Seasons hotel after lunch. Standing at the counter to check in was one of the tallest men I’d ever seen. His back was to me, but it was relatively clear to this detective that he was a basketball player (nearly 7 feet tall, black, and checking into the Four Seasons). So I pretended to have to rearrange things in my briefcase until he left the counter and I could see who he was.
And that’s when I saw the face of the man alternately goofed on as “that big wooden Indian” and “that Easter Island statue-looking mo’fo'” by me and my friends for years. Yes, I was face-to-face (well, face-to-sternum, to be accurate) with Robert Parish, former center of the Boston Celtics. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame this weekend, so it made sense for him to come to Boston a few days early (the Hall is in Springfield, about 70 miles away).
Which makes me think of how much I hated the Celtics in the 1980s, when they were always battling the Lakers in the NBA finals, and how much I grew to respect them, once they all got old and started retiring. I’m saving my long piece on that for another novel about mythology and death. You’ll see.
Off to the elopement party. Wish the groom good fortune.