Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors Movie Review — 1965

October has arrived, which means that in our house the calendar has essentially handed my wife and me an excuse to spend our movie nights watching horror films. This is one of my favorite little traditions. We don’t spend October chasing whatever happens to be the newest horror release or scrolling endlessly through streaming services looking for something with a sufficiently ominous thumbnail. We go backward. We dig into the classics, the old favorites, the movies that helped establish the language of horror long before everything needed to be louder, bloodier, faster, and more grotesque. Some nights are genuinely great. Some are simply entertaining. And every once in a while, we stumble across something that reminds me why I have such an affection for old-fashioned horror in the first place.

Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, released in 1965, falls somewhere in the middle for me. I enjoyed it, particularly for its atmosphere and its wonderfully dated sensibility, but I wouldn’t put it in the same category as some of the Hammer films that I genuinely love. If I’m being completely honest, I guess you could say that I am more of a Hammer House fan. Give me Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing wandering through a gloomy European castle, some fog rolling across the grounds, candlelight flickering against stone walls, a sinister laboratory hidden somewhere beneath the house, and a story that takes itself just seriously enough to be deliciously macabre, and I’m a happy man. Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors scratches some of those same itches, but it is doing something slightly different.

The movie is an anthology, and the framing device is wonderfully simple. A group of strangers find themselves sharing a train compartment with the mysterious Dr. Schreck, played by Peter Cushing. Schreck introduces himself as a doctor, although the name itself is suspicious enough to make you wonder whether anybody should accept medical advice from him. He produces a deck of tarot cards and proceeds to tell each of the passengers a story about their future. Naturally, these aren’t cheerful little predictions involving financial prosperity and a long, healthy retirement. These are tales of murder, supernatural vengeance, werewolves, killer plants and assorted unpleasantness.

It is a wonderfully British way to spend a train journey.

What I particularly enjoy about the setup is how restrained it is. The movie doesn’t need an elaborate explanation for why these men are sitting together or why this strange man has decided to entertain them with stories of their impending doom. They’re simply there, trapped together in a compartment, listening to a peculiar fellow deal out cards and tell them what may be waiting for them. The train itself becomes a kind of liminal space, a place between destinations where normal rules feel slightly suspended. You are moving through the darkness, you don’t really know the people sitting beside you, and suddenly one of them begins describing how each of you might die.

That’s good horror territory.

Peter Cushing is also terrific in the role, even though I found myself wishing the movie had given him even more to do. There is something almost effortless about Cushing’s ability to make a room feel sinister simply by sitting quietly in it. He doesn’t have to shout or contort his face. His voice, posture and extraordinarily controlled manner are enough. He brings an intelligence to the character that makes Dr. Schreck more interesting than he might otherwise have been. You never quite know whether he’s merely entertaining these men, warning them, or manipulating them.

And then the stories begin.

This is where the movie becomes decidedly uneven, which is probably the biggest reason I’m landing at three stars. Anthology films are always something of a gamble because you’re essentially watching several miniature movies stitched together. If you love one segment and aren’t particularly taken with the next, the entire experience can begin to feel like a collection of good intentions rather than one satisfying story. Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors certainly has its moments, but the individual tales don’t all land with the same force.

Some of them are much more effective than others, and part of that has to do with the nature of the stories themselves. The movie was made in an era when horror could suggest far more than it showed. A sinister expression, a shadow moving across a wall, a strange sound from another room, a character realizing that something is terribly wrong, and suddenly you’re left imagining the rest. That restraint can be wonderfully effective when the atmosphere is right.

Other times, though, I found myself waiting for the story to get somewhere.

That’s the biggest problem I had with the movie. The pacing can feel leisurely, even by the standards of 1960s horror. I don’t necessarily object to slow pacing. In fact, I generally prefer a movie that understands the value of atmosphere and doesn’t feel compelled to explain or reveal everything every thirty seconds. But there is a difference between deliberate pacing and simply taking too long to get to the point. A few of these stories feel as though they’re circling their destination rather than moving toward it.

Still, there is something tremendously charming about the way the movie looks.

This is where I found myself appreciating it most. The cinematography has that unmistakable quality of mid-century British horror. There is a richness to the interiors, a careful use of shadows, and an almost theatrical quality to some of the sets. The movie doesn’t have the polished visual sheen of modern horror, obviously, and that’s precisely the point. You can feel the physicality of the sets. You can feel the wood, the glass, the velvet, the old furniture and the painted backdrops. There is a tactile quality to it that digital filmmaking simply can’t reproduce because the movie was made in a world where these things physically existed in front of the camera.

That matters more than people sometimes realize.

Old horror movies have a particular texture. They look photographed rather than manufactured. Even when the effects are obviously dated, there is something wonderfully honest about them. You can see the work that went into creating the illusion. Sometimes a creature looks like a man in a costume, and somehow that makes it more enjoyable rather than less. There’s a handmade quality to the filmmaking that I find increasingly appealing as I get older.

And then there’s the atmosphere, which is really the movie’s strongest weapon.

The train compartment provides the perfect setting for the framing story. Outside the windows is darkness. Inside is low light, smoke, polished wood, old-fashioned clothing and five men sitting around listening to tales of supernatural horror. It feels claustrophobic without being overtly frightening. There is a sense that the train is carrying them somewhere they may not want to go, and Dr. Schreck seems almost like a ferryman of the supernatural, sitting quietly in the corner and dealing out cards while everyone else slowly realizes that these stories might be more than stories.

That framing device also gives the movie a wonderful sense of inevitability. Once the cards are dealt, the audience knows something unpleasant is coming. The fun becomes watching the characters realize what we already suspect. It is an old-fashioned storytelling trick, but when handled properly, it creates a particular kind of tension. You aren’t necessarily wondering if something terrible will happen. You’re wondering how it will happen.

That’s an important distinction.

Modern horror often depends on surprise. Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors is more interested in anticipation. It wants you to sit there and wait. It wants you to look at the characters and think, “Oh, you’re in trouble.” There’s something almost mischievous about it.

And that’s probably why this movie works better for me as an October movie-night experience than it does as a straight horror film.

There’s something about watching it with the lights down, knowing that autumn is outside, and letting yourself settle into the slower rhythm of an older film. October is one of those months when the world itself seems to do half the work for horror. The evenings arrive earlier. The air gets colder. The leaves are changing. The house gets quiet. You don’t necessarily need some digital monster screaming into the camera to create an atmosphere. Sometimes you just need an old movie, a dark room, and Peter Cushing sitting across from a group of increasingly uncomfortable men with a deck of tarot cards.

That is enough.

I also think my preference for Hammer films colors how I feel about this movie. Hammer has a particular aesthetic that I absolutely adore. Their horror films often feel lush, gothic, romantic and decadent. There are castles and crypts, thunderstorms and laboratories, beautiful women in danger, mad scientists, ancient curses, graveyards, elaborate costumes and performances that occasionally seem to exist somewhere between sincere drama and glorious theatrical excess. Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors isn’t quite operating in that register. It is more of an anthology thriller with supernatural elements than the full Gothic banquet I associate with Hammer.

And perhaps that’s why I admire it without completely falling in love with it.

There’s plenty here to enjoy. The cast is excellent, the concept is clever, Peter Cushing is always a pleasure to watch, and the old-fashioned presentation has an undeniable charm. I particularly appreciate that the movie isn’t trying to bludgeon me into being frightened. It trusts atmosphere, suggestion and storytelling. It belongs to an era when filmmakers understood that what you don’t see can sometimes be considerably more unsettling than what you do.

But I also found myself occasionally checking the clock, metaphorically speaking. Some segments simply didn’t grip me as strongly as others, and the anthology structure means that the movie never quite develops the sustained momentum of a single narrative. Just as I was getting invested in one story, it would end and we’d be starting another. That can be part of the fun, but it also prevents the movie from developing the kind of emotional or narrative weight that a more unified horror story can achieve.

Still, I don’t regret spending an October evening with it.

Quite the opposite.

There is something satisfying about watching these older horror movies during the month of October, especially when you’re watching them with someone you love. It turns the movie into part of a larger tradition rather than simply another title on a list. My wife and I have made this our little October ritual, and movies like Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors fit naturally into it. We’re not necessarily looking for perfection. We’re looking for atmosphere, history, strange stories, old performances, memorable imagery and that particular feeling you get when the calendar turns to October and suddenly everything feels a little more appropriate for ghosts, monsters and things that go bump in the night.

Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors gives us plenty of that.

Would I choose it over one of my favorite Hammer productions? Probably not. My affection for Hammer’s gothic world is simply too strong. But I enjoyed spending time aboard this peculiar train with Dr. Schreck, and I appreciate the movie much more for what it represents than for any individual scare. It is a relic of a different kind of horror filmmaking, when atmosphere mattered, stories could unfold patiently, and a deck of tarot cards could be enough to make an entire train compartment uncomfortable.

For me, that’s worth something.

Three stars feels about right. It’s a fun, atmospheric piece of vintage horror with an excellent framing device and the always-welcome presence of Peter Cushing, but its uneven anthology stories and leisurely pacing keep it from becoming one of those October classics I’ll be desperate to revisit every year.

Still, October is long, and there are plenty of dark nights ahead.

And that’s exactly what movie night is for.

Happy Friday, and Welcome to October

Happy Friday, everyone. There is something about the first Friday of October that feels different from an ordinary Friday. Maybe it is the cooler air, maybe it is the first real suggestion of color beginning to creep into the trees, or maybe it is simply the fact that October carries its own personality. September always feels like summer reluctantly packing its bags, but October actually closes the door behind it. The mornings are colder, the evenings arrive earlier, the leaves begin changing from green to yellow and red, and there is that unmistakable smell in the air that tells you New England has turned the page. You can feel autumn coming even before you see it, and around here, that is one of my favorite things about living where we do.

I got home from the hospital not too long ago, and Sadie came through the door from her office about fifteen minutes ago. It is one of those Friday evenings where neither of us is particularly interested in doing anything complicated. We have both had full weeks, and there is something wonderfully luxurious about being home, knowing that there is nowhere else we have to be tonight. The dogs have already greeted us as though we had been gone for six months rather than a workday, the house has settled into its evening rhythm, and outside, the October air is starting to take on that coolness that makes you want to put on a sweatshirt and stay outside for another twenty minutes simply because you can.

And, of course, October means one very important thing in our house: Halloween movie season has officially begun.

Sadie and I have a tradition that we have more or less perfected over the years. Once October arrives, our movie nights become devoted almost entirely to Halloween and horror. But let me establish something right from the beginning: we are not sitting around watching whatever shiny piece of modern cinematic garbage happens to have been released last week. There is plenty of that stuff out there, and life is too short. We like our horror movies with some history behind them. Give us the classics. Give us the movies that were made before every frame had to be polished until it looked like it had been assembled inside a computer. Give us the late 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, and usually the early 2000s. That is generally where our cutoff lives.

There is just something about those movies.

Maybe it is the practical effects. Maybe it is the grain of the film. Maybe it is the fact that houses actually look like houses, streets actually look like streets, and teenagers look like teenagers rather than thirty-five-year-old actors pretending to be seventeen. Maybe it is because those movies were often willing to let a scene breathe instead of bombarding you with sound effects every three seconds. Horror used to understand that sometimes the most frightening thing in the room was the room itself. A hallway. A basement. A telephone ringing in the middle of the night. A car parked at the wrong place. A porch light that suddenly goes out. You didn’t necessarily need a digital monster exploding through a wall to make people uncomfortable.

And that is what makes October movie nights so much fun. We can pull up a list, start arguing about what qualifies as “Halloween,” wander down a rabbit hole of movies we have not seen in years, and suddenly an ordinary Friday night turns into a little trip backward through time. Sometimes we know exactly what we are going to watch. Sometimes we spend longer choosing the movie than actually watching the movie. Tonight falls squarely into the second category. We have absolutely no idea what we are watching yet.

I am currently sitting here writing this while the outdoor wood-fired pizza oven has been going since I got home. There is something deeply satisfying about lighting a fire on a cool October evening. The wood crackles, the temperature climbs, and the whole backyard takes on that faint smell of smoke and burning hardwood that somehow makes everything feel more seasonal. I could probably cook dinner in a perfectly modern kitchen with an appliance that has approximately seventeen settings and an instruction manual the size of a medical textbook, but there is something about making pizza over a real fire that feels considerably more civilized.

Eventually we will make our pizzas, probably with far more toppings than we actually need, and carry them inside while they are still ridiculously hot. Then there will be drinks, a few gummies, blankets, the dogs wandering around wondering why nobody is sharing the pizza with them, and eventually a horror movie playing on the television. It is a pretty good way to spend a Friday night.

The only catch is that we cannot stay up until two in the morning watching movies, because tomorrow is going to be one of those long soccer Saturdays.

We have to be there at 7:00 in the morning, which is a time of day that I generally prefer to experience from the other side of a warm cup of coffee. I will be there as a volunteer physician working in the medical tent, while Sadie will be coaching four teams, with my nephew playing on each of them. And when she isn’t coaching, she will be right there beside me in the medical tent as my other half. Between the two of us, we will spend most of the day somewhere between soccer fields, sideline medical care, athletic injuries, hydration problems, and whatever else a full day of youth soccer decides to throw at us.

It is actually one of the things I really enjoy about volunteering for these events. There is something wonderfully ordinary about it. No trauma bay. No operating room. No fluorescent hospital corridors. Just fields, parents, coaches, kids running around with far more energy than any human being should possess at that hour of the morning, and a medical tent waiting for the inevitable collection of bumps, bruises, sprains, and the occasional situation that actually requires a physician. Sadie will spend the day moving between coaching and medicine, somehow finding the energy to do both, while I will be keeping an eye on the medical side of things. It is going to be a long day, but it will also be one of those days that we will probably remember fondly.

Which is precisely why tonight probably should not turn into an accidental midnight horror marathon.

Although, if we stumble across the right movie, all bets are off.

There was another little moment this evening that made me laugh, and it was one of those oddly specific personal moments that would mean absolutely nothing to anybody else but immediately meant something to me. When Sadie came walking in from the garage, she was singing “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison. Not quietly, either. She came into the house already in the middle of it, completely unprompted, as though the song had simply followed her home from wherever she had been.

The instant I heard her singing it, something clicked in my head. I looked at my watch.

October 2nd.

Ah.

Now, I am not going to tell you why October 2nd is important to Sadie. Some things belong to the people who lived them, and this is one of those little pieces of our life that I will keep private. But I will tell you this: October 2nd is a very special and sentimental date for her, and “Brown Eyed Girl” is tied closely to it. It is one of those songs that has somehow become attached to a particular memory, a particular time, a particular feeling, and once that happens, you never really hear the song the same way again.

That is one of the strange and beautiful things about music. A song can sit quietly on the radio for twenty years and then, suddenly, one particular date or one particular person or one particular afternoon attaches itself to those notes, and from that point forward the song belongs to that memory. You hear the opening and you are not simply hearing Van Morrison anymore. You are somewhere else entirely. Memory has a funny way of hijacking music and turning it into a kind of emotional time machine.

So naturally, after singing it on her way through the door, Sadie immediately put “Brown Eyed Girl” on our speaker system.

Of course she did.

And I would be willing to place a fairly substantial wager that she is currently listening to it in the shower.

That is simply how Sadie operates.

There is something I find particularly endearing about moments like that. We spend so much of our lives immersed in schedules, responsibilities, work, obligations, alarms, meetings, pages, patients, traffic, grocery lists and everything else that adulthood throws at you. Then suddenly someone walks through the door singing a song from another part of their life, and for a few minutes the machinery of the day stops. You remember that underneath all the professional titles and responsibilities, we are still just two people who have accumulated years of memories together, many of which are connected to completely ordinary things: songs, movies, dinners, places, weather, holidays, old jokes, and certain dates on the calendar.

October 2nd happens to be one of those dates.

And while I am not going to explain the story behind it, I think there is something rather nice about keeping a few stories private. Not every memory needs to be turned into a public explanation. Some things can simply exist between two people, understood perfectly by the two people who understand them. The song comes on, one person smiles, the other person immediately knows why, and that is enough.

Meanwhile, outside, the pizza oven is still burning, the October evening is settling in, and the trees are beginning their annual transformation. We are just at the beginning of it now. A little yellow here, a little red there, a few leaves on the ground that were not there a week ago. In another couple of weeks the landscape will look completely different. That is one of the things I love most about New England. The seasons do not politely announce themselves and then linger indefinitely. They arrive, take over the landscape, and eventually surrender it to the next season.

October is my favorite version of that transition. It has one foot in the comfortable warmth of summer and the other firmly planted in the colder months ahead. You can still spend an evening outside, but you want a sweatshirt. You can still sit on the porch, but you bring a blanket. The sun is still there, but it disappears earlier. The leaves are still mostly green, but you can see what is coming. Everything is changing, but it has not changed completely yet.

Maybe that is why October has always felt like such a good month for old movies.

There is something fitting about sitting in a darkened room watching a film from 1985 or 1993 while the real world outside is becoming darker and colder. The television throws light across the room, the dogs eventually settle down, the pizza disappears one slice at a time, and the opening credits roll. For a few hours, the outside world can wait.

So that is where we are tonight. Sadie is in the shower, presumably still listening to Van Morrison. I will head upstairs shortly and take my own shower, then we will figure out what movie gets the honor of being our first official October horror movie. I have a feeling there will be some debate. There always is. We will probably scroll through a dozen possibilities, reject half of them for reasons that make perfect sense to us and absolutely nobody else, and eventually settle on something that one of us will say we haven’t seen in years.

Then the pizza comes out of the oven, the lights go down, the movie starts, and October officially begins in our house.

Tomorrow morning, reality returns at 7:00 a.m. with soccer fields, medical bags, coaching, four teams, my nephew, and a full day ahead of us. Tonight, though, the world is quiet. The pizza oven is glowing outside, the leaves are turning, Van Morrison is playing somewhere upstairs, and there is nowhere we need to be for a few more hours.

Honestly, I cannot think of a better way to start the first weekend of October.

And one more thing before I head upstairs: Happy Birthday, Joanne. Some dates never stop carrying the people we love with them, and October has a way of bringing memories to the surface. Tonight, in the middle of the pizza, the movies, the changing leaves, and the ordinary chaos of life, I am thinking of you too.

Happy Friday, everyone. Welcome to October. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a pizza oven to tend to and a horror movie to choose.

I Know What You Did Last Summer Movie Review — 1997

There are movies that you remember because they were genuinely extraordinary, and then there are movies you remember because of where you were in your life when you saw them. I Know What You Did Last Summer belongs firmly in the second category for me, and honestly, I think that is part of what makes revisiting it so much fun. This is a movie wrapped up in a particular moment of my life, a particular moment in American pop culture, and a particular kind of teenage experience that is getting harder to reproduce. When this movie came out in 1997, I was in high school, and I was pretty much the exact age and demographic this thing was designed to grab by the collar and drag into the theater. It wasn’t merely a horror movie that happened to be playing at the multiplex. It felt like an event.

And, more specifically, it brings back memories of date night.

That probably sounds funny now, because watching I Know What You Did Last Summer in 2026 is a very different experience from watching it as a teenager in 1997. But that is precisely why nostalgia has such a peculiar relationship with movies. You aren’t simply watching the film again. You’re watching the person you were when you first encountered it. You remember the theater, the atmosphere, the people you were with, the anticipation before the lights went down, the feeling that this was something everybody was talking about. For a teenager in the late 1990s, there was something almost ritualistic about going to the movies with someone you liked, sitting in the dark, and watching a beautiful cast of young people run around being stalked by a man with a meat hook. Romance had many forms.

The movie arrived in October 1997, only a year after Scream had helped reinvigorate mainstream horror, and it was impossible not to feel that connection. Suddenly, horror movies were cool again. They weren’t necessarily the grimy, low-budget creatures that adults associated with drive-ins and video stores. They were glossy, stylish, contemporary, filled with young actors who looked like people you actually knew, or at least people you desperately wanted to know. I Know What You Did Last Summer understood the appeal immediately. It took the familiar ingredients of the slasher movie and put them into a late-1990s teen drama package.

And what a package it was.

Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jr., and Ryan Phillippe were essentially the perfect quartet for this particular cultural moment. They were young, attractive, charismatic, and recognizable enough to feel like celebrities without yet seeming impossibly distant. There was a certain late-90s aesthetic surrounding young Hollywood that is difficult to explain to someone who wasn’t there. Everything seemed slightly cleaner, slightly shinier, slightly more optimistic. Hair was immaculate. Clothing had its own unmistakable period flavor. Cars looked cool. Teenagers somehow had access to enormous houses and nice clothes despite apparently never having jobs. And everybody seemed to spend an extraordinary amount of time walking around coastal California looking mildly terrified.

The movie itself is built around a wonderfully simple premise. Four teenagers are involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident on a dark coastal road. Rather than report what happened, they make the catastrophic decision to dispose of the body and keep the whole thing secret. A year later, somebody begins reminding them that their secret hasn’t stayed buried.

It is not an especially complicated premise, and that is part of its strength. The movie doesn’t need an elaborate mythology. The central fear is almost primitive: What if the thing you thought you got away with came back? There is something deeply adolescent about that fear, even though the consequences in this movie are obviously much more serious than the ordinary disasters of teenage life. High school is full of secrets, mistakes, lies, guilt, and the constant fear that somebody will find out what you did. Usually the worst consequence is embarrassment. Here, the consequence happens to involve a man carrying a gigantic fishhook.

The hook itself is one of those wonderful pieces of horror iconography that becomes inseparable from the movie. The killer isn’t simply a guy with a weapon. The fisherman coat, the hood, the hook, the silhouette, the wet nighttime streets and foggy coastal environment all combine to create an image that is immediately associated with the film. You don’t need to see his face to know exactly what movie you’re watching.

Visually, the movie has that unmistakable late-90s glossy horror aesthetic. There is a lot of darkness, rain, mist, nighttime driving, coastal atmosphere, and dramatic lighting, but everything is still polished enough to feel like a major studio production rather than something lurking on a shelf in the horror section of a video store. The coastal setting is particularly effective. The fictional town of Southport feels isolated without becoming completely remote, and the movie makes good use of the ocean, docks, fishing boats, narrow roads, fog, and weather. The setting gives the story a slightly Gothic quality without abandoning its contemporary teenage sensibility.

There is also something wonderfully 1997 about the movie’s pacing. It doesn’t have the frantic, hyper-edited quality that many modern horror movies embrace. It gives scenes room to breathe. Characters drive around. They talk. They look at each other suspiciously. They go to parties. They wander through town. Somebody receives a threatening message. Somebody sees something in the distance. The tension builds in relatively conventional increments. Watching it now, I can appreciate that rhythm because it gives the movie a kind of atmosphere that has become less common. It feels like a movie rather than an amusement-park ride.

And then there is the central mystery. Who knows what they did?

That question carries the movie more effectively than the actual identity of the killer. The threat works because the characters don’t know how much the killer knows. Every anonymous message becomes potentially catastrophic. Every shadow could mean something. Every stranger could be watching them. Every knock at the door has a little more weight because the audience knows that these people have something to hide.

The movie also benefits enormously from the fact that the protagonists aren’t innocent victims in the traditional sense. They made a terrible decision. They were young and frightened and stupid, but they made it deliberately. That creates an interesting moral tension beneath all the screaming and running. The killer isn’t simply hunting random teenagers. He is exploiting their guilt and fear. Their secret becomes the weapon used against them.

Of course, I’m not going to pretend this is some profound examination of human morality. It isn’t. This is a late-1990s teen slasher movie, and it knows exactly what it is. But there is a difference between a movie being intellectually profound and a movie having an effective thematic engine. I Know What You Did Last Summer understands that guilt is inherently cinematic. You can photograph guilt. You can put it in a rearview mirror. You can hide it behind a doorway. You can make a character hear a noise in the middle of the night and wonder whether someone knows.

And that’s what makes the movie work.

What really gets me now, though, isn’t the suspense. It’s the memory.

I remember being in high school when this came out. That alone changes the entire experience of watching it again. In 1997, these actors were young people. I was a young person. The characters were dealing with things that seemed vaguely adjacent to my own life, even though obviously I had never participated in a murderous hit-and-run and subsequently been stalked by a homicidal fisherman. The world of the movie felt contemporary because it was contemporary. There wasn’t twenty or thirty years of cultural distance between the audience and the characters. Their clothes, hairstyles, music, cars, attitudes and surroundings belonged to the same world I was living in.

That is something movies can preserve in a way photographs sometimes can’t. A photograph shows you what you looked like. A movie can remind you what the world felt like.

Watching this now takes me back to being that teenager in 1997, when going to the movies was still a genuine social event. There was no streaming service waiting at home with an algorithm telling you what to watch next. You didn’t casually throw a movie on while scrolling through your phone. If you wanted to see something, you went to the theater. You bought the ticket, stood around with everyone else, found your seat, and waited for the lights to go down. If it was a horror movie, there was always that little electricity in the room because you knew you were about to spend the next couple of hours getting scared with a bunch of strangers.

And if you were on a date, well, that added another layer entirely.

There was something almost comically reliable about a horror movie being a good date movie when you were young. You could sit close together, pretend the terrifying parts were the reason you were holding hands, and nobody had to admit that maybe the whole point was being close to the person sitting next to you. I Know What You Did Last Summer was practically engineered for that environment. It had attractive young actors, romance, suspense, murder, teenagers making questionable decisions, and enough jump scares to give everybody an excuse to move a little closer.

That is part of why I have such affection for it now. I’m not watching it from the perspective of someone trying to determine whether it holds up against every horror movie ever made. I’m watching it as somebody who remembers what it meant when it came out. It was one of those movies that seemed enormous at the time. You heard about it. People talked about it. You saw the posters. You knew who was in it. You knew the basic premise. It was part of the cultural atmosphere of the moment.

And maybe that is the real secret of revisiting older movies. Sometimes you aren’t really revisiting the movie at all.

You’re revisiting yourself.

I Know What You Did Last Summer takes me back to high school in 1997, to a time when I was young enough that a night at the movies could feel like an entire adventure. It reminds me of date nights, movie theaters, teenage excitement, and that peculiar late-90s feeling that the future was still wide open. The movie itself may not have aged into some towering masterpiece of the horror genre, but that isn’t really why I keep coming back to it. Some movies earn their place in your memory because of what they accomplished. Others earn it because they arrived at exactly the right moment in your life.

This one arrived at exactly the right moment for me.

So when the fisherman appears out of the darkness, hook in hand, and that unmistakably late-1990s atmosphere settles over the screen, I don’t just see four teenagers being stalked through a fictional coastal town. I see a movie theater from another era. I see high school. I remember what it felt like to be young, to go out on a date, to sit in the dark beside someone, and to have absolutely no idea that nearly three decades later, watching the same movie again would feel less like watching a horror film and more like opening an old photograph album.

That’s the funny thing about movies. We think we’re remembering them.

Sometimes they’re remembering us.

Happy Birthday Joanne

Happy Birthday, Joanne. Today would have been your 73rd birthday, and I find myself thinking about how strange birthdays become when someone you love is no longer here to celebrate them. There is something almost unfair about the way the calendar keeps moving after a person dies. January comes and goes, spring arrives, summer fades into autumn, another Christmas appears, another year is crossed off, and somehow the world continues spinning as though nothing extraordinary happened. But for the people who loved you, certain dates never become ordinary again. Your birthday is one of those dates. January 27 is another. They sit quietly on the calendar, but they carry a weight that only grows with time. Today, instead of being able to call you, hear your voice, tease you about getting another year older, or simply say, “Happy Birthday,” we have photographs, memories, stories, and that peculiar ache that comes from knowing the person we want to talk to is the one person who cannot answer.

You were taken from us on January 27, 2018, and there are some days in life that become permanently etched into your memory with such precision that you almost don’t have to think about them. You simply remember. I remember that day. Samantha and I had gone out to grab some tacos in Burrillville, one of those completely ordinary little errands that means absolutely nothing when you’re living it and becomes strangely precious when you look back years later. We came back to the house to see you. You were sick, and at the time nobody seemed to understand exactly what was happening. The doctors hadn’t figured it out. We knew you weren’t well, but there is a terrible difference between knowing someone is sick and understanding that you are standing in the final hours of their life. None of us knew we were living through the last ordinary moments we would ever have with you.

And, because life has a strange sense of humor, you were watching Goodfellas. Of all the movies, of all the evenings, of all the completely mundane things that could have occupied that room, that was what was playing on the television. I have thought about that countless times since. Who would have thought that would be the last movie you ever watched? There was nothing ceremonial about it. No orchestral music, no warning from the universe, no little voice telling us to pay attention because this was the last time. It was just you, sick on the couch, a movie playing in the background, and Samantha and me there with you. That is how death usually arrives, I suppose. It doesn’t knock politely and announce itself. It slips into an ordinary afternoon and changes everything.

Samantha helped you to the bathroom that day. I can still think about how normal that sounds when written down, because helping someone you love to the bathroom is one of those completely unremarkable acts of caring that families do every day. And then, on the way back, everything changed. You passed away in front of us. We tried to help you. We did everything we could in those moments, but sometimes medicine, determination, love, and sheer human will are simply not enough. There are moments when you can know exactly what you wish you could do and still be utterly powerless to change what is happening in front of you. That is a particularly cruel lesson for someone who has spent a lifetime believing that if you work hard enough, think clearly enough, and care deeply enough, you can usually find a way through a problem. Sometimes there is no way through it. Sometimes all you can do is remain beside the person you love.

I have often thought that there is something both heartbreaking and beautiful about the fact that Samantha was with you when you died. I wish the circumstances had been different. I wish you had been given another twenty years. I wish there had been another birthday, another Christmas, another Mother’s Day, another family gathering, another ordinary Tuesday when she could have called you for no particular reason. But if you had to leave this world, at least you were not alone. Your daughter was there. Someone who loved you was holding onto you as the world was changing around both of you. And although neither of us could possibly understand the magnitude of that moment while it was happening, I think about it now with a kind of reverence. You spent your life being her mother, and in the end, she was there with you.

Today Samantha put together photographs of you and her throughout her life. There are pictures from when she was growing up, pictures from holidays, pictures from her graduation, little pieces of a life that passed much too quickly. Looking at photographs like that can be a strange experience. A photograph freezes a moment that was once completely ordinary, but years later it becomes evidence that the moment existed at all. There you are, smiling. There she is beside you, younger and still becoming the woman she would eventually be. Neither of you knew what the future would bring. Neither of you knew which photograph would someday become precious because it was one of the last pieces of a particular chapter of your lives together.

Among those photographs Samantha included two thoughts that struck me deeply. One was, “Luxury is being able to call your mom and hear her voice.” The other was a line attributed to Chloe Frayne: “I will love you for the rest of my life and you will not be here for any of it.” There is something almost unbearable about the simplicity of those words. We spend so much of our lives assuming that the people we love will remain available to us. We assume we can call tomorrow. We assume there will be another holiday. We assume there will be another conversation, another argument, another laugh, another chance to say the things we didn’t say the first time. We don’t recognize the luxury of hearing someone’s voice until silence is all that remains.

Joanne, I wish you could see your daughter now.

I genuinely wish you could sit across from her for an afternoon and simply watch the woman she has become. I wish you could hear her talk about her life, see the things she has accomplished, watch the way she carries herself, and realize that all of those years of raising her, worrying about her, teaching her, correcting her, encouraging her, loving her, and trying to prepare her for the world actually worked. She became the woman you wanted her to become. She is a grown woman now, a mature woman, a successful woman, a business leader, an intelligent woman with a sharp sense of humor, a beautiful woman, and, perhaps most importantly, an independent one. She has learned how to stand on her own feet. She has learned how to navigate a world that does not always make things easy. She has made mistakes, picked herself up, kept moving, and built a life of her own.

You would be proud of her. I don’t think there is any question about that.

I sometimes wonder what you would say if you could see her now. Would you recognize the little girl in the photographs immediately, or would you need a moment to reconcile that child with the woman standing in front of you? I imagine you would notice all the things that haven’t changed first. Maybe the expression in her eyes. Maybe a mannerism. Maybe the way she laughs. Mothers have an almost supernatural ability to recognize their children beneath the years. Then, I imagine, you would start noticing everything she has become. You would see the confidence. You would see the independence. You would see the intelligence and the humor. You would see the life she has built. And somewhere in that moment, I think you would realize that the things you tried so hard to give her were not lost. They took root.

You did your best raising her, Joanne, and it shows.

There is no such thing as a perfect parent, because there is no such thing as a perfect human being, and raising another human being is one of the most impossible jobs anyone can undertake. You can love your child fiercely and still get things wrong. You can worry when you should relax, push when you should wait, protect when you should let go. You can spend years wondering whether you did enough. But eventually, if you are fortunate, you get to see the person your child becomes, and that person becomes the answer to many of those questions. Samantha is your legacy in the most meaningful sense of the word. Not merely because she is your daughter, but because so much of what you poured into her remains alive in the woman she is.

After you died, I tried to continue some of what you had been doing for her. I tried to fill spaces that were never really mine to fill, and I know now that some spaces simply cannot be filled. I tried anyway. I tried because I loved Samantha, because I cared about you, and because I knew how much you had meant to her. Looking back, I can admit that I failed at trying to replace what she had lost. Of course I did. Nobody could replace her mother. Nobody could step into your place and recreate the relationship the two of you had. That was never possible, no matter how much love or good intention was involved.

But something remarkable happened despite that failure: Samantha grew.

She grew into herself.

She became independent. She became strong. She learned to make her own decisions and live with them. She learned to find her way through difficult things without needing someone to hold her hand every step of the way. She built a life and became someone who does not merely survive the passage of time but tries to live it. She is doing what I think you would have wanted her to do. She is living. She is experiencing things. She is laughing. She is working. She is building. She is finding happiness where she can and carrying the things that matter with her. She has not forgotten you. I don’t think she ever could.

There is something profoundly bittersweet about being able to witness that transformation while knowing you cannot. I have had the strange privilege of knowing you and then being here to see the woman your daughter became afterward. I was there for one of the most painful moments of her life, and I have also been fortunate enough to see so many of the good moments that followed. I have watched her become the person she is today, and sometimes I think about how much you missed. That is the part that hurts. You missed so much. You missed years that should have belonged to you. You missed milestones, holidays, celebrations, ordinary dinners, random phone calls, jokes that would have made you laugh, and countless little moments that nobody thinks to photograph because they seem too insignificant at the time.

Those are the moments I wish you could have had.

I wish you could have known the woman Samantha became. I wish you could have sat with her over coffee and talked about nothing important. I wish you could have complained about something together. I wish you could have rolled your eyes at her. I wish she could have called you when something ridiculous happened and heard you laugh on the other end of the phone. I wish you could have been there when she was successful and when she was frustrated, when she was proud and when she was uncertain. I wish you could have been there simply because mothers are supposed to be there for those things.

But perhaps there is another way of looking at it.

Maybe a person’s life does not end entirely when their heart stops beating. Maybe parts of us continue in the people we loved, in the lessons we taught without realizing we were teaching them, in the habits and values we passed along, in the stories other people tell about us years later. Maybe a mother lives on in the way her daughter carries herself through the world. Maybe every time Samantha demonstrates some bit of strength, intelligence, kindness, humor, or determination that she learned from you, a small part of you is still moving forward.

If that is true, then you are still very much here.

You are in the photographs. You are in the stories. You are in the memories of the people who knew you. You are in Samantha. And, in a smaller way, you are in me too, because I had the privilege of knowing you and sharing a piece of your life. I will always remember that last day. I will always remember that you were sick and that we did not understand what was happening. I will always remember the television playing Goodfellas. I will always remember Samantha helping you to the bathroom. I will always remember how quickly an ordinary day became the day everything changed. Those memories are painful, but I don’t want to erase them. They are part of knowing you. They are part of loving the people who are no longer here.

And so, Joanne, on what would have been your 73rd birthday, I don’t want this to be only a sad remembrance. There is sadness, certainly, and there always will be. Losing someone you love leaves a permanent shape in your life. But there is also gratitude. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to know you. I am grateful for the time we had. I am grateful that I got to be there, even though I desperately wish the circumstances had been different. I am grateful that I have been able to watch your daughter grow into the woman she is today. And I am grateful that your memory is still important enough that your birthday can bring all of these thoughts rushing back.

Samantha, my “Lil Bean,” I want you to know something too. I am happy you became who you are. I am proud of the woman you have grown into, and I hope you know that your mother would be proud of you too. Life did not go exactly as any of us planned. In fact, life has a rather nasty habit of ignoring the plans we make for it. Your mother was supposed to be here for so much more of your life. She was supposed to see more of you, celebrate more with you, worry about you more, probably annoy you more, and give you advice whether you wanted it or not. She was supposed to grow older alongside you. She didn’t get that chance, and that is profoundly unfair.

But you did not let that unfairness define you.

You kept going.

So keep going. Live the life you have. Laugh loudly. Travel. Work hard. Love fiercely. Be ridiculous sometimes. Take pictures. Celebrate birthdays. Make memories. Call the people you love while you still can. Don’t save the important words for some imaginary tomorrow, because tomorrow is not something any of us are promised. And whenever you look at those photographs of your mother, don’t only think about the woman you lost. Think about the woman who raised you, the woman who loved you, the woman who wanted you to become exactly the kind of person you ultimately became.

I think she would look at you and know that she did something right.

So, Happy Birthday, Joanne. Wherever you are, I hope somehow you can see the life your daughter has built. I hope you can see the woman she became. I hope you can see that all the years of love, sacrifice, worry, teaching, and parenting mattered. More than that, I hope you know that you are still remembered. Your name still gets spoken. Your photographs still get looked at. Your daughter still carries you with her. And on your birthday, years after that terrible January day, there are still people sitting quietly and thinking about you.

I am thankful for the time we had. I am thankful I knew you. I am thankful I was there for your final moments, even though I wish with everything I have that those moments had never been your final ones. I am thankful for Samantha, for the woman she became, and for the privilege of watching her continue the story that you began.

Happy Birthday, Joanne.

Your daughter made it.

She is strong. She is smart. She is funny. She is beautiful. She is independent. She is living her life. And she carries a piece of you wherever she goes.

So, Samantha, my Lil Bean, go live it. Soar. Fly high. Make your mom proud.

I think you already have.

Forever and always,

Stephen

October Arrives With a Roar

What a beautiful day it is here. It is the first of October, and somehow October has arrived with absolutely no interest in easing us into it. The thermometer is sitting at 67 degrees, the air has that unmistakable coolness that tells you summer has packed its bags, and by the looks of the trees around here, autumn is already here in full force. There are leaves changing everywhere I look, some trees still stubbornly green, others turning yellow, orange, and that deep rusty red that seems almost too saturated to be real. The fields have taken on that muted autumn color, the woods are beginning to look less like a wall of green and more like an enormous painting in progress, and the morning light has that softer quality that makes even the ordinary things around home look slightly more beautiful than they did a few weeks ago. There is something about the first of October in New England that makes you want to slow down and notice things, although I suppose I did a fairly poor job of slowing down today.

Sadie and I were up at 4:00 this morning for our usual jog, and I have to say, it was fantastic. There is something almost primitive about being outside at that hour when the rest of the world seems to be asleep. The roads are quiet, the air is cool, and out here in the country there is very little to compete with the sound of your own footsteps and your breathing. Every once in a while you hear something moving in the woods, which is always enough to make you wonder whether it is a deer, a raccoon, or something considerably more ambitious that has decided to observe the morning exercise program from the darkness. The stars are still hanging around at that hour, and the horizon has only the faintest suggestion that another day is coming. We finished our run, came back home, and then released the two fur missiles we call our dogs into the yard for their own morning adventure. They have never been particularly interested in the concept of a leisurely morning. To them, 4:30 in the morning is apparently an entirely reasonable time to investigate every square inch of the property as though something critically important might have happened overnight. Watching those two tear around the yard while Sadie and I stood there drinking coffee was probably the most accurate representation of our household one could possibly get.

Sadie eventually got ready and headed into the office, while I had the rare luxury of realizing that I had absolutely nowhere I needed to be. I am off today, which is always a dangerous thing to tell me because I have a rather loose definition of what constitutes “having something to do.” I changed out of my usual morning clothes and into something a little more appropriate for the season, slacks and a long-sleeve button-down shirt. That felt like a fairly significant transition. One day you are wearing summer clothes and wondering whether the air-conditioning is too cold, and suddenly you are standing in front of the closet thinking, “Well, I suppose we are wearing long sleeves now.” It is one of those tiny seasonal rituals that I actually enjoy. The clothes change, the coffee tastes a little better, the mornings become darker, and suddenly the house begins to feel like an autumn house.

When I got home, I wandered around for a while trying to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of the morning. I could have stayed home. I could have found something productive to do. I could have tackled one of the many little projects that accumulate around a property this size with the determination of weeds. Instead, I did what any sensible person would do on the first day of October when the temperature is 67 degrees and the roads are dry: I went looking for the keys to the 1982 Porsche 911SC.

There are cars that you drive because they are convenient, cars you drive because they are comfortable, cars you drive because they are impressive, and then there are cars that seem to have been built specifically to give you an excuse to go somewhere you don’t actually need to go. The old 911 is very much in that last category. It is not particularly interested in whether you have an errand. It doesn’t care whether you are going to the grocery store or merely around the corner. It seems to operate under the assumption that if the engine is running, something interesting ought to be happening.

So I climbed in, turned the key, and woke it up.

There is something wonderfully mechanical about the sound of that air-cooled flat-six coming to life. Modern cars start. The Porsche announces itself. There is a metallic, mechanical quality to the sound, a combination of machinery and personality that has largely disappeared from contemporary automobiles. You can hear things working. You can feel the engine through the car. There is no sense that a computer has politely asked a collection of components to cooperate. It feels more like you have awakened a machine that was already waiting for you.

And naturally, I drove it the way it likes to be driven.

I wasn’t out there trying to set any records or behave like a lunatic. I was simply driving the car with enthusiasm, which is a very different thing. The twisting roads around here are perfect for it. You come into a corner, turn the wheel, feel the chassis settle, roll into the throttle, and the car seems to tighten itself around the road. The steering has that old-school directness that modern cars often simulate but rarely reproduce. There is no great filter between your hands and the front wheels. You know what the car is doing. You know what the road is doing. You become part of the conversation.

Then you straighten out, squeeze the throttle, and that flat-six reminds you that it is not merely decorative.

The engine climbs through the revs with that distinctive Porsche sound, the exhaust note getting sharper and more insistent as the tachometer moves upward. The car gathers speed with an urgency that feels completely different from the sterile acceleration of a modern performance car. A modern sports car can be astonishingly fast, almost absurdly so, but the old Porsche makes the process itself the event. You hear the engine. You feel the weight shift. You feel the suspension working. You hear the tires. You smell the leaves and damp earth coming through the open air around the car. The whole experience is physical.

And that is exactly why I love driving it.

The roads around here were magnificent today. Rural Rhode Island in October has a particular character that is difficult to explain to somebody who has never spent time in the back roads. You get long stretches of pavement disappearing between stone walls and woods, little farms tucked behind fields, old houses that have probably watched generations of people come and go, and the occasional deer standing beside the road with the unmistakable expression of an animal wondering why humans insist on building noisy machines and then driving them through the woods. The landscape is changing almost daily now. A tree that was green on Monday can be half yellow by Thursday. Leaves collect along the shoulders of the roads, and when you pass through a section of woods, some of them lift into the air behind you in little swirling clouds.

It is difficult to imagine a better place to drive an old Porsche.

At some point during the drive, the radio found “Two Princes” by the Spin Doctors, and for a few minutes the entire world seemed to become a late-summer memory. There is something about that song that belongs to a particular kind of sunlight, and today it worked beautifully against the early autumn landscape. The Porsche was moving along the winding road, the trees were beginning to turn, and the song had that loose, energetic quality that made the whole thing feel almost mischievous. It wasn’t quite summer anymore, but it wasn’t really cold-weather autumn either. It was that brief period in between, when the air is cool enough to make you appreciate a long sleeve but warm enough that you don’t yet need a jacket. I passed fields with the first serious accumulation of fallen leaves along their edges, sunlight flickering through the trees, and the old Porsche seemed perfectly matched to the moment. “Two Princes” is not a song I would necessarily describe as sophisticated, but perhaps that is precisely why it worked. The car, the road, the leaves, the music, the whole thing had a wonderful lack of pretension.

Then came “The Warrior” by Scandal, and suddenly the character of the drive changed. That song has a completely different energy, and with the Porsche engine humming away behind me, it seemed almost hilariously appropriate. There is something wonderfully eighties about hearing it while driving a car from 1982. The car itself suddenly felt less like an antique and more like a time machine. Here was this air-cooled 911, built during the same era as the song playing through the speakers, running through the New England countryside while the trees changed color around me. The road twisted through the woods, the engine rose and fell with each corner, and I had one of those little moments where the calendar seemed to disappear. For a few miles, it wasn’t 2026. It was simply an old Porsche, an eighties song, an empty country road, and October. That is one of the great pleasures of old cars. They don’t merely transport you geographically. Every once in a while they transport you temporally.

And then, because apparently the radio had decided to curate the morning for me, “Pink Houses” by John Mellencamp came on.

That one felt almost made for the scenery.

There is something deeply American about driving through rural country with “Pink Houses” playing in the background. I passed old farmhouses, fields, barns, weathered fences, and woods that looked as though they had been standing there long before anybody thought about building a highway through the area. The song has always carried a sense of ordinary American life with it, and out here, surrounded by these little pockets of countryside, that feeling seemed particularly strong. The Porsche was humming along, the leaves were moving across the road, and the sky was beginning to develop that slightly gray quality that October sometimes brings. It wasn’t gloomy yet. If anything, it made the colors of the leaves stand out more. The reds seemed redder, the yellows brighter, and the dark evergreens looked almost black against the changing foliage. The whole scene had that peculiar New England combination of beauty and melancholy that arrives every year whether you are ready for it or not.

Eventually I made my way to the café in town, which has become one of those places where you no longer really need to explain who you are. You simply walk through the door and people know you are there. I have been coming here long enough that it has become part of the rhythm of my life, one of those little places that would probably look entirely unremarkable to a stranger but means considerably more to the people who frequent it. The Porsche is outside, the coffee is inside, and the same collection of characters tends to orbit through the place throughout the day.

Kevin, of course, is here. Kevin is here seven days a week. I have begun to suspect that he may actually live here and simply goes home occasionally to maintain the illusion that he has a house. We always end up having some sort of conversation, and it is never quite predictable where it will go. That is part of the appeal of these places. You can sit down intending to drink a coffee for twenty minutes and find yourself still there an hour later because somebody has wandered in with a story, an opinion, a question, or some completely unnecessary but entertaining piece of information that somehow becomes the topic of conversation.

Mike the Plumber #1 and Mike the Plumber #2 are also here, both apparently engaged in the serious business of determining what they are going to have for dinner. This is one of the great mysteries of adulthood. We spend years becoming educated, developing careers, paying bills, making complicated decisions, and somehow dinner remains one of the most difficult logistical problems known to mankind. The two Mikes are debating their options with the sort of seriousness normally reserved for geopolitical negotiations, and I am listening to the discussion thinking that this is exactly the kind of completely ordinary conversation that makes a place like this enjoyable.

Joe has just arrived as I am writing this, and I am sure others will wander in before the day is over. That is how these places work. People drift through. Someone leaves, someone else arrives, another person stops for coffee, and suddenly a completely ordinary Thursday has developed its own little cast of characters.

Outside, the Porsche is sitting there waiting for me.

I keep looking through the window at it.

There is something particularly satisfying about seeing that car sitting outside a little rural café on the first day of October. It doesn’t look out of place, exactly, but it certainly looks like it has somewhere more interesting to be. The wide stance, the simple shape, the unmistakable silhouette, the fact that it was built more than forty years ago and still looks purposeful rather than old-fashioned. There are very few cars that can do that. Most automobiles from 1982 look like artifacts now. The 911 looks like a car.

And a very impatient one.

I suspect I’ll let it sit there for a while longer before heading home. There is no particular reason to rush. That is one of the nicest things about being off from the hospital. There are days when every minute seems accounted for, when the schedule has been carved into stone and the phone can produce another problem at any moment. Today isn’t one of those days. Today there is coffee, conversation, an old Porsche outside, and an October afternoon slowly developing beyond the windows.

Eventually I’ll head home and probably take the long way.

Sadie and I are going to my brother’s house for dinner tonight, which should be fun. My brother, my sisters-in-law, and the four kids will all be there, so I suspect “quiet family dinner” is not exactly the phrase I would use. It will be lively, noisy, funny, and probably involve somebody talking over somebody else. That is family, after all. There will be food, conversation, the inevitable stories that have already been told several times but somehow remain funny, and the four kids providing the kind of energy that makes adults wonder where they get it.

The only question now is whether the weather is going to cooperate.

As I sit here writing this, the sky has begun to turn a little gray. Not ominous, exactly, but noticeably different from the bright morning we started with. The sunlight has faded behind a thin layer of cloud, and the landscape outside has taken on that soft, subdued October quality that makes everything look slightly older and more peaceful. Maybe it will clear again. Maybe it will rain. Around here, the weather in October is notoriously indifferent to whatever plans we have made.

And perhaps that is fitting.

October is not really a month that asks permission. It simply arrives. The leaves change whether you are watching or not. The mornings become darker. The evenings arrive earlier. Summer quietly disappears, and before you quite realize what has happened, there is a chill in the air and the first hints of winter hiding somewhere on the horizon.

So today, on the first day of October, I got up at four in the morning, ran with my wife, turned two completely unreasonable dogs loose into the darkness, put on long sleeves for the first time in a while, climbed into a forty-four-year-old Porsche, and drove it through the changing countryside with three great songs playing on the radio.

Honestly, I can think of worse ways to spend a Thursday.

For now, I’ll finish my coffee, stay here a little longer, listen to the conversations around me, and watch the gray clouds gather outside. Eventually I’ll head home, get ready for dinner, and trade the café and the Porsche for family and whatever chaos awaits at my brother’s house.

But the Porsche will be sitting in the driveway when I get home, and I already know I’ll look at it as I walk past.

It has been a good morning.

A very good morning.

And October, apparently, has arrived with a roar.

THE UNWELCOME TENANTS

I knew something was wrong with my ear the moment I woke up. There was a faint scratching sound coming from somewhere inside it, followed by what sounded unmistakably like a tiny sneeze. At first I assumed I had slept on the telephone, which was not an especially unreasonable conclusion considering the state of my bedroom. But when I tilted my head to one side, I heard a small, muffled voice say, “Move over.”

There were people living in my ear.

This is not, under ordinary circumstances, considered a medical emergency. Ears are surprisingly accommodating little places, and apparently there is no specific law prohibiting temporary occupancy. The residents had furnished the place rather nicely, too. I could feel one of them walking around, while another appeared to be dragging something heavy across the inside of my ear canal. I was less concerned about their presence than I was about the possibility that they intended to stay.

I cleared my throat and politely asked them to leave.

Nobody answered.

I tried again, somewhat louder, and was rewarded by a series of irritated whispers. Evidently they had become accustomed to the accommodations and were not prepared to surrender them merely because the landlord had finally discovered the arrangement. I considered calling a doctor, but explaining the situation over the telephone seemed unnecessarily complicated. I could already imagine the receptionist asking whether I meant there were people near my ear.

So I resorted to bribery.

I placed a small piece of cheese beside my ear and waited. Almost immediately, there was tremendous activity inside. I heard footsteps, a brief argument, and what sounded like somebody shouting, “There’s cheese!” A few seconds later, the occupants began emerging one at a time, climbing out and dropping onto my pillow. They were very small, badly dressed, and apparently carrying several pieces of furniture with them.

They gathered on the floor, looked up at me with considerable resentment, and then marched toward the hallway. One of them stopped at the door and pointed accusingly at me, as though I had somehow violated their privacy.

I watched them disappear down the stairs and went to make coffee. It occurred to me that I was probably not the first person to wake up with unexpected tenants in an inconvenient part of his anatomy. Somewhere, I thought, there was undoubtedly a tired traveler opening his eyes that morning and wondering why his elbow was furnished.

THE FATHER WHO SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT THIS THROUGH

“Dad, can I ask you something?”

His father looked up from the newspaper and immediately became suspicious. There are certain openings to a conversation that no parent hears without a slight tightening of the stomach, and this was one of them.

“Sure,” he said cautiously.

“Where do babies come from?”

The newspaper lowered by approximately two inches.

“Well,” his father said, “that’s an interesting question.”

The boy waited.

His father considered several possible answers, rejected all of them, and then settled upon the first explanation that entered his mind, which was unfortunate because it involved a delivery truck, a mysterious bakery, and a moonlit orchard inhabited by unusually cheerful fairies.

“Basically,” he began, “when a baby is needed, the nighttime delivery people come through town carrying a large basket. They stop at the little bakery behind the church, where the bakers make babies out of flour, cinnamon, and a special kind of sugar that only grows under the full moon. Then the moon gardeners put the babies in wooden crates, and the delivery people bring one to the house where it belongs.”

The boy appeared impressed.

“Really?”

“Absolutely,” said his father, now committed to the lie.

“And how do they know which house?”

“Well, each baby has a tiny address written on its foot.”

The boy thought about this for a moment.

“What if they get the address wrong?”

“Then,” his father said, “there are some very awkward conversations.”

The boy nodded solemnly and seemed satisfied.

His father began raising the newspaper again when the boy spoke.

“Okay. Then where did the television come from?”

The father froze.

“The television?”

“Yeah.”

He stared at his son for several seconds.

Then he slowly folded the newspaper.

“Same people,” he said. “Different bakery.”

THE WINTER THAT LASTED ELEVEN MINUTES

We had prepared ourselves for a long winter that year, the sort of winter that begins in November and settles over a town with the grim determination of a relative who has come to stay indefinitely. By the end of autumn, the cellar was stacked with firewood, the animals had been brought into the barn, the windows had been sealed, and the pantry was sufficiently stocked to sustain the household through several months of snow, ice, and the general inconvenience that accompanies being unable to see the road. My father had even sharpened the old snow shovel, which was considered excessive at the time but which, as events would demonstrate, was not nearly as excessive as some of the other preparations we had made.

The last week of November was unusually cold, and everyone could feel winter approaching. The sky had taken on that particular grayness that seems to press down upon the fields, and the wind had begun moving through the trees with the low, persistent sound of something large and unpleasant approaching from a considerable distance. Then, one afternoon, the storm arrived. Snow came down so heavily that within minutes the pasture disappeared, the barn roof was nearly obscured, and the old oak trees behind the house were bending under the weight of the wind. We hurried inside, bolted the doors, pulled the curtains, and built up the fire until the stove was glowing. Ma put a pot of broth on the range, and for the first time that season everyone began discussing winter as though it were an actual adversary that had arrived at the front gate and intended to remain until spring.

It was a convincing performance. We sat around the kitchen in our heavy sweaters and wool socks, listening to the wind howl outside and congratulating ourselves on having had the foresight to prepare. My father remarked that we would probably be snowed in until March. My mother said she hoped we had enough coffee. Someone mentioned that the chickens would have to be checked in the morning, assuming the door could still be opened. We had all settled mentally into the long confinement of winter when, approximately eleven minutes after the storm began, the entire thing simply stopped.

There was no gradual improvement, no final gust of wind, and no dignified retreat of the weather toward some distant horizon. One moment we were in the middle of a blizzard and the next there was nothing. The wind disappeared, the clouds parted, and sunlight came through the kitchen window as though somebody had switched on a lamp. We opened the door cautiously and discovered that the snow was already melting. By the time we reached the porch, birds were singing in the trees. A few minutes later, the first flowers began opening in the garden, which was particularly confusing because we had planted none of them.

Within the hour, the temperature had risen to nearly ninety degrees.

There we stood in our wool coats, scarves, sheepskin-lined boots, and thick gloves, looking out over a landscape that had somehow gone directly from December to late June while we were standing in the kitchen. The chickens were wandering around as though nothing unusual had happened. A pair of robins had returned to the apple tree. Somewhere down the road, a man had apparently decided that this was an excellent opportunity to mow his lawn, and the distant sound of his lawnmower seemed almost insulting.

Nobody said much. We simply stood there looking at one another, because there are certain circumstances in which language is not particularly useful. We had spent weeks preparing for winter, had endured eleven minutes of it, and had somehow arrived in summer. The fire was still blazing in the stove. Ma’s broth was still simmering. There were six cords of firewood stacked in the shed and enough canned food in the cellar to sustain us through a siege.

For the next two weeks, we mostly waited.

Nobody trusted the weather anymore. Every morning we looked outside expecting snow. Every evening someone checked the thermometer. We left the storm windows up because taking them down seemed presumptuous, and we continued wearing sweaters in the house despite the fact that everyone was sweating. My father refused to put the snow shovel away. “It’ll be back,” he said, with the grim confidence of a man who had spent three hundred dollars preparing for something that had lasted eleven minutes.

Winter never returned.

Eventually the flowers died, summer arrived properly, and we accepted that the previous season had apparently been nothing more than a meteorological misunderstanding. But every November afterward, when the first cold wind came through the valley, somebody would look toward the woods and ask whether we ought to bring in the animals.

Nobody laughed.

We had learned our lesson.

Weather, like family, is capable of changing its mind without consulting anybody.

THE DAY THE GEESE ARRIVE

I have been preparing for the geese.

Other people may be caught completely unprepared when the geese finally arrive, but I intend to handle the occasion with dignity. I have spent considerable time thinking about what a person ought to say when confronted by a large number of geese under circumstances that have not yet been explained.

I have several possibilities.

“Ah. Geese.”

Or perhaps, “Well, this is unexpected.”

There is also the more enthusiastic approach:

“Welcome, geese. I hope your journey was pleasant.”

I have practiced these statements in the kitchen, in the car, and once while waiting for the pharmacist to find my prescription. The pharmacist seemed uncomfortable, but I believe that was because she had not been informed about the geese.

I have considered other responses.

“Good afternoon, distinguished birds.”

“Please remain calm.”

“I assume you have come to discuss the matter.”

The last one seems particularly useful because it establishes immediately that I am prepared for negotiations.

Of course, nobody knows when the geese will arrive. It could be tomorrow. It could be next Tuesday. They may come in the morning, or they may appear suddenly at dusk and stand silently in the driveway, waiting for someone to acknowledge them.

This is precisely why preparation is necessary.

When the moment comes, I do not intend to panic.

I will take a deep breath.

I will look the lead goose directly in the eye.

And I will say the one thing I have decided upon with absolute certainty:

“Good. You’re here.”

THE DAY I FINALLY LEFT THE CHAIR

It began as an ordinary afternoon, which is how most significant events begin before anybody realizes they are significant. I had been sitting in my favorite chair for some time, staring at the television without actually watching it and wondering whether there was anything in the refrigerator worth getting up for.

There was not.

This was important.

I considered remaining where I was.

Then, for reasons I still cannot fully explain, I thought, “Perhaps I should stand.”

The idea seemed radical.

For years I had treated the chair as a destination rather than a temporary arrangement. I had sat there through entire afternoons, evenings, and at least one birthday. I had developed a system for reaching the remote without changing position. I had become, in a very real sense, part of the furniture.

But that afternoon something changed.

I leaned forward.

My feet touched the floor.

I stood.

For several seconds I remained upright, amazed by the possibilities that had suddenly become available to me. The kitchen was there. The hallway was there. The front door was there. I could go anywhere.

I walked to the refrigerator.

There was still nothing worth eating.

Nevertheless, I felt different.

I had done something difficult, something nobody had specifically asked me to do, and something I had previously regarded as entirely unnecessary.

Perhaps others would follow.

Perhaps future generations would hear about the afternoon when a man simply decided that sitting down was no longer sufficient.

Or perhaps tomorrow I would sit back in the chair and never get up again.

But at least now I knew I could.