All Over Albany

A little bit of summer in January

There's a short story by Skidmore professor -- and Pulitzer Prize winner -- Steven Millhauser in the January 3 issue of The New Yorker (the same issue that sits in the pile of all the other issues you haven't gotten to, yet). "Getting Closer" is about summer, childhood and anticipation:

Though who's to say when anything begins really? You could say the day began when they passed the wooden sign with the words "INDIAN COVE" and the outline of a tomahawk, on a curve of road with a double yellow line down the middle and brown wooden posts with red reflectors. Or maybe it all started when the car backed up the slope of the driveway and the tires bumped over the sidewalk between the knee-high pricker hedges. Or what if it happened before that, when he woke up in the morning and saw the day stretching out before him like a whole summer of blue afternoons? But he's only playing, just fooling around, because he knows exactly when it all begins: it begins when he enters the water. That's the agreement he's made with himself, summer after summer. That's just how it is. The day begins in the river, and everything else leads up to it.

Millhauser's novel Martin Dressler won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

[via Skidmore Unofficial]