I didn't wait till 11 to send this post about November, but I didn't have to tell you that either

Happy Friday, and happy November. You know what Hemingway said about November? He said:

November reminded the man of a Spaniard, an old friend of the man's father. The man had been about ten when the Spaniard had come around. The Spaniard was full of swagger and bluster, and it had made the man—the man who was a boy, then—wrap his arms tight around himself and shrink away, as if from a gale that announced itself loudly as it came, banging the limbs of the elms together like drunken Irishmen swinging croquet mallets at one another at a Long Island Easter party they'd crashed trying to impress a girl, a girl whose heart had been promised to another since before she'd even been born, perhaps since the dawn of time itself, a girl whose name both would-be suitors had already forgotten, but whose face would burn in their minds like the sun itself until the very day they died.

The Spaniard himself did not drink, but he did take cocaine throughout the day from a snuffbox he tucked in the inner left breast pocket of his field jacket. "Near my heart," he would say, with a smirk that was friendly enough, almost, to be a smile, and a wink at the boy, the boy who would become the man. "Because it is my only love." The way he said it told the boy that the Spaniard had once had another love, and he thought the Spaniard wanted to be asked about that other love, but when the boy did ask—as a boy of ten might safely do, wrapped yet in the armor of innocence which every child may don, but that every man must lay aside—when the boy asked about the Spaniard's first love, the dark Iberian eyes grew sad, and it seemed for a moment he would speak, but instead he simply closed them, shook his head, and used a finger to wipe away the cocaine residue that dusted his mustaches. Later, the man's father told him the Spaniard was a homosexual, and that his name was Don Noviembre. That was most likely why he reminded the man of November, now that the man thought about it, even though they had met in March or thereabouts. He remembered the season, because besides his cocaine, Don Noviembre had sipped periodically from a Shamrock Shake, pale green like the man's mother's favorite dress.

See you all Monday morning; I hope you have a lovely weekend.

The Fun Part

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