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The Senior | Mr. Harrison Sr.

@mrharrisonsr

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Jeff Tracy-esque father-of-5. Husband to a tolerant wife. Q-Branch technologist by day, martini-imbiber by night, fine-wine bottle-emptier by weekend.

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For a few weeks now it’s felt like a different season. This week the Red Sox — surely the team of the summer — falling to the Yankees seemed quite fitting in that sense. Sadly for Sox fans, the Yankees have always been better this time of year. Jeter, let’s not forget, was Mr November. Reggie, Mr October. For me, because of family holidays, the seasonal association has become personal: We visited Fenway in the summer and were in New York as a family while the Yankees were in the World Series in 2024. Perhaps I just spend so much of my life watching baseball. I think my wife thinks I spend too much time watching sports in general when I could be doing something more productive.

I’ve been thinking more and more about the way time passes and how we spend it. I’ve been thinking a lot about money too. I hate the phrase “time is money.” It isn’t. Money is money. Time is something else. You can inherit money. Put it in the bank. Borrow it. Lose it. Find it again. Make more of it. Nobody has ever managed that with a summer evening at Fenway with their kids. Admittedly, whilst that particular evening itself might have been expensive considering the tickets, the getting there. The cost doesn’t hold any place in what I remember and yet I could spend an hour telling you almost everything around me as my kids smiled at each other for a single moment in the second inning. Yet we continue to conflate the two.
We’ve made time into money because money is easier to count. We spend time making money. We spend time spending it. It’s a pretty stupid system. Often, by the time you realise it, there’s nothing left you can buy that is worth the time you lost. We call time money because we have a whole system that tells us what money is worth. We’re used to putting a price on everything, whether it’s worth something or not. Time is different. We don’t seem to know what it’s worth. It just keeps falling from us like pocket change, whether we want to spend it or not.

Anyway - here are some photos from another wonderful evening (that felt unseasonal then but that feel suitably seasonal now) a few days after that night at Fenway. Sand Beach, Stonington. taken in Stonington, Maine by @mrharrisonsr

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16 days ago

When I first started buying CDs over thirty years ago, Dylan’s mid-1970s albums were common finds in the bargain bin and probably entered my collection at the time only because my meagre funds could buy more of them than a new release. Now they’re some of the music I revere most. by @mrharrisonsr

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21 days ago

Great day at Wembley for the Union Jack Classic with a couple of the boys. Some of them even scored free T-shirts. Whilst not yet a converted college football fan Fox (7) managed to get in the background of BNK on Fox as well as high-five Baby Jay.

“I live a double life. On the outside, in public, l am a full-blooded base-
ball fan—mild mannered, somewhat cultured, fascinated by poetry, swayed by romance, a student of history.
“Stan Musial, you say?” I might remark at a party while wearing a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows. “Why, did you know that Stan Musial had exactly 1,815 hits both at home and on the road? Doesn’t that just speak directly to the mathematical rhythms of baseball and life?” But this is only the face I show the world.
I have another face, another side, a part of me that, as Jack Nicholson says in A Few Good Men, I don’t talk about at parties. This is a part of me that prefers gray days, that feels most alive as the days grow short, that feels like barking at a television set or gnawing on barbecue in a stadium parking lot or screaming about John Elway… Yes, I am a football fan.” - Joe Posnanski, ‘Why We Love Football’ taken in Wembley Stadium by @mrharrisonsr

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a month ago

I hate the expression “I couldn’t put it down.”

You’re not supposed to notice that you’re holding a book. That’s not the act you’re engaged in. That’s not it at all. The whole physical business is incidental.

The book is there. Your hands are there. But, if it’s good, you are somewhere else. There shouldn’t be any “I” anymore. You should be beyond that.

It’s not about the physical object. It’s about the experience.

If anything, the book is holding you, not the other way round.

If a book has weight, you only realise you’re carrying it long after you do put it down. But that’s something different entirely. It needs distance.

It’s all wrong. by @mrharrisonsr

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a month ago

It’s not every day that you receive a mention in the acknowledgment section of a book. The fact that it’s a book by @timhayward a writer I genuinely admire, that I’m mentioned on the same page as luminaries on the subject, and that this somehow the third cocktail book to include me in that section probably means I drink too many cocktails, but it hopefully also means that when it comes to cocktails I know what I’m talking about when I say this book particularly is something special.

This time last year I was discussing the impending 100-year anniversary of ‘Barflies and Cocktails’ with the great-grandson of its author at Harry’s NY Bar Paris and I reasoned that (much like the sections that rendered that book a classic) more so than ever in the current publishing landscape when it comes to any new cocktail book, mere cocktail recipes, however good or inventive they might be, were never going to enough to create something truly worthwhile: Recipes and variations of all the classics can be found online and yet most people still don’t really drink cocktails at home because a recipe alone doesn’t inspire. What people want and need are stories, insights (personal or otherwise) about each cocktail. Those are the things that are useful. Those are the things that we go to cocktail bars for. Those are the things that on a Wednesday night, when we can’t go to Harry’s (or Duke’s or The Connaught) we can at least discover in a book. Armed with that too perhaps you’ll be inspired. Perhaps you’ll rush out to buy ice. Perhaps you’ll be ‘elated’ enough with the outcome to spend an hour online discovering where you can buy Peychaud’s and wormwood bitters so you can impress your friends come Friday. That’s what a great cocktail book can do. And that’s exactly why Tim’s new book, which I’ve had for a little while now (one of the perks of being on the Acknowledgements page perhaps) is just that. taken in 29RR by @mrharrisonsr

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a month ago

For a time, when I first met her, my wife wore a ring on her thumb. For no particular reason I remembered that small detail whilst re-reading Sam Shepard the other day.
Every now and then I fall into the well that is Shepard’s work. I become haunted by vignettes, images, memories, both imagined and my own. The only way out is to try and put them down on the page:

She was wearing an aged, black concert T-shirt that had faded to the colour of a cloud before a storm. The name of the band hung on, still there, cracked and broken across her body, though you would have to have known the band to recognise their name.
Across the room, with her back to him, she reached for the glasses on the shelf and the shirt hem lifted to reveal the top of her Levi’s holding her hips. That was when he saw it. The soft white edge of lace beneath the small of her back.
The refrigerator made its old mechanical sound. The radio played, “…Your sister sees the future like your mama and yourself... You’ve never learned to read or write, there’s no books upon your shelf…” and for a moment he remembered what it was like to be twenty-three.
The glasses sounded against the table, and he watched her face, waiting for eye contact as she sat.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She looked back at him for a second, then smiled as though she knew exactly what he meant and yet wasn’t going to make it easy.
Beneath the table edge, the shirt hung free, loose about her waist. The lace had disappeared.
There were certain things you could spend a whole life trying to relive and never improve upon. taken in America by @mrharrisonsr

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a month ago

If you consume only one thing over lunch today, then fill up on Nathan Dunne’s recent piece on Revolutionary Road writer Richard Yates’s unpublished letters via The Paris Review website:

“Here’s this month’s alimony, with all my love.
And I’ll be damned if that isn’t a masterpiece of a sentence, which could serve as an epigramatic [sic] definition of our marriage... Is everything all right? Got no letter from you for over a week now, and it makes me a little nervous… I guess it’s inevitable that your letters should start to space out, though, and I’m sure you must be busy.” —Yates to his wife during their separation.

If that isn’t enough to pique the appetite of admirers of Yates unique observations of failed human connections (and lovers of Revolutionary Road — and what reader isn’t), Joan Didion fans get a rather sweetly venomous morsel of observation about her marriage too… by @mrharrisonsr

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a month ago

“Some men see things as they are, and say why, I dream of things that never were, and say why not.” (Attributed to) Bobby Kennedy

Beautiful, fitting words from the pages of my copy of W.P. Kinsella’s ‘Shoeless Joe’ (the original novella which was the basis for ‘Field of Dreams’) taken in Dyersville, Iowa by @mrharrisonsr

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a month ago

Fresh photos of the same old scenes from Geneva this week. Wanting to write specifically about yet another return visit to Brasserie de l’Hôtel-de-Ville (a place I think I’ve been eating at for almost a decade) I thought I’d check back on old posts. What I wanted to make a point of is how the modern world - and Instagram might be the worst representation of it - seems somehow fixated with discovery and prioritizes what is new. We speak so often about discovery as though permanence is merely a failure to keep up. Doing so however, I realised I think I may have already said what I wanted to say, but perhaps there’s something appropriate in that too - a caption from last year:

“...I think that if I look back far enough I’ve posted photos (probably better ones) of these same views from a past visit. Within these walls, little has changed, and I think that’s why I try to go back every time. So much of what I love about restaurants, perhaps even life, is present here. I don’t care for what’s fashionable. I love the places that stay as they were, that seem to resist any overriding appeal for the new.
It makes no claim to be the best restaurant, and like your mother’s kitchen that’s part of its charm. The food is as it always was — good value, steady, never setting out to overwhelm or wildly impress. The staff similarly too... In a time when everything is constantly updated, reimagined, rebranded [and supposedly improved] I find myself drawn to what refuses to change and is just familial. Compared to that, excellence is vastly overrated.
To return is to witness some sense of permanence, a reminder that not all things must be the best, new or modernised to have worth and that, in fact, true worth comes from the opposite. It’s that satisfaction of sitting where you once sat, of tasting something familiar, and looking upon those things which will be there long after you leave for the last time. That the greater pleasure isn’t in fresh new discovery but in enjoying those same venues that might still feed your children one day if only there is justice in the world.” taken in Hotel De Ville, Geneva Switzerland by @mrharrisonsr

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a month ago

Hemingway’s ‘one true sentence’, Dieter Rams ‘less is more’ I think every hero I’ve ever had believed in simple, honest things. Perhaps that’s why I love a maxim. Here are a few of my favourites (in no particular order):

- You learn from what you endure, never from what you achieve.
- What is worn holds more truth than what is new.
- The best men are never those who are the best dressed.
- You won’t get to use even a tiny percentage of what you learn. You learn however that that’s not the point of learning.
- You can spend years becoming someone, only to realise you preferred who you were before.
- Work can give you purpose. It can also give you somewhere to hide from what you should be doing.
- Some things you don’t get to make right.
- Nothing that lasts does so unblemished.
- Some weights you carry become part of how you stand.
- You can spend years preparing for a moment that has already passed.
- You don’t always get closure. Sometimes you just get distance.
- You can’t beg to be treated with respect.
- You’ll always need a Plan C.
- You don’t have to act like those you think of as heroes (in fact maybe it’s better that you don’t) but you do need to be sure that you act differently to those you think of as enemies.
- Always keep your word. Not because reputation offers glamour, but because when dealing with the worst type of people at least you’ll have some leverage.
- Let the work shape you, not define you.
- Love fully. And expect to fail.
- Read the right books. And know that there are wrong ones.
- If you think your time is important then do the obvious thing and buy an expensive watch. If you think people are important then spend your money and time more wisely.
- The hard conversations you avoid don’t disappear. They just continue forever until spoken aloud.
- If you don’t think you can change the past, you haven’t lived through enough of it. What you remember isn’t a fixed record of what happened: You’ll forget, you’ll edit, you’ll focus on different things and will learn to see them all differently as time goes on.

(Redford - just because it’s coming up to the anniversary of his death and he always seemed to embody integrity itself). by @mrharrisonsr

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2 months ago

You get to the point in your life eventually when you realise that you can go down the road and get lost somewhere in all that shit — French press, AeroPress, Moka pot, Blue Mountain, grind your own Yirgacheffe — but that all you really wanted was the taste of drip coffee poured from a BUNN in any diner in America.

Woke up and went for a run at dawn this morning listening to Waits’ ‘Closing Time’ - the best album for that time of the morning, especially as everything in town began to look like a Sunday morning painted by Hopper. I had the dog walked and was in the shop buying fruit to top pancakes for the kids by seven. Home, showered and a few years of Cheever read before anyone else was awake. And the Yankees won. Bliss. by @mrharrisonsr

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2 months ago

“My Dad keeps a record collection in cardboard boxes lined up along his bedroom wall collecting New Mexican dust. His prize is an original Al Jolson 78 with the jacket taped and even the tape is ripped. Last time I saw him he tried to bribe me into taking it back to LA and selling it for a bundle. He’s convinced it’s worth at least a grand. Maybe more, depending on the market. He says he’s lost touch with the market these days.
My Dad has a picture of a Spanish señorita covered in whip cream pinned above the sink on his kitchen wall. My Dad actually does. He walked me over to it and we both stared at it for a while.
“She’s supposed to be naked under there, but I’ll bet she’s wearing something,” he said…
My Dad lives alone on the desert. He says he doesn’t fit with people.

4/79
Santa Fe, New Mexico” — ‘Motel Chronicles’ Sam Shepard by @mrharrisonsr

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