George Harrison

Ice is slowly melting

2001

Sometimes the days just go so fast, tumbling capriciously by like a box fallen off the back of a truck. In June 2001 that’s what I was thinking. My sister Ann and her daughter were in town, on their way back to New York from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, staying at one of those nice hotels on the Near North Side, and Mack either forgot or expected me to stay until the last lunch drunk blinked his way out of The Hot Stuff and into the sunshine. The song on the jukebox seemed a little out of key, which matched my mood. The staff outnumbered the patron two-to-one, literally two-to-one; the customer was leaning back and closing his eyes for seconds at a time, so I threw my bar rag into the hamper and told Mack “He won’t know if I’m gone – he can’t see, and my sister?”