A Small Nice Thing

+ A Dalloway Marathon tomorrow

Jun 13, 2025

When I was little, we lived in a tall house near the ocean, and most evenings my father called me and my brother outside to watch the sky. We had a pretty clear look at the sunset, and in my memory my dad was out there every night that he could be, standing quietly while the the sun dematerialized into the ocean. He wanted us to come look, too.

When I consider it now, I think this must have been about him appreciating the vast distance he traveled in his adulthood, having been a kid whose bedroom was an attic in New Jersey. The improbability of him being able to watch a Pacific sunset every night, etc. But as only a kid myself, I thought that he was just cueing me to the importance of observing this diurnal ceremony the sky put on, and this made sense to me, too. We lived there for eight years of my childhood and then we left, and nowhere I lived after that had a view of the sunset over the horizon, so I mostly forgot about this thing we did ritually a long time ago.

But lately I was walking home through a neighborhood in a city far from the Pacific. Somehow, as an adult, I’ve landed in Maine, as far away from the southern California of my childhood as I can possibly be while still remaining in the continental United States —a kind of ultimate prodigal-child location, though unintentionally. I tried to move back to California, I really did. But here, when I wake up in the morning, I hear seagulls, which is what I heard upon waking in the tall house.

And in the evening, when I walk home from a meeting with a new friend, I pass the park that has an overlook facing west. Every night, especially in nice weather but in brilliant, brutal winter afternoons, too, you see people gathering there to watch the sun go down beneath water. Every single night. This is how it was the other night:

Look how we do this!

That’s all :)

+ an event TOMORROW in NYC

The 92nd Street Y is putting on a marathon reading of Mrs. Dalloway tomorrow (Saturday, 6/14) to celebrate the novel’s centennial. I’ll be reading between 4 and 5pm, alongside Adelle Waldman, Rachel Syme, and Heidi Julavits. If you’re in NYC and want to follow up your No King’s Parade with some Virginia Woolf, swing by and say hello. RSVP here.