It's been unseasonably warm here, but I've still been wearing a coat and a stocking hat. It's not THAT unseasonably warm. We're still talking "warmth" in the mid-to-high 40s and that means a coat and a stocking hat in my book. We're not complaining, but it's here around the holidays when it's hard not to hope that we're just going to get dumped on by some lumbering snowstorm that hangs around for a day and a half and just unloads everything its got in its guts. We'd like to be sliding around, slipping past the intersections that we had been meaning to turn right or left onto and we'd secretly like to dust off those shovels and get working on clearing the walks. We're at the point in our year when we relent - when we're okay with it getting uncomfortable and we'll just see what we can make of ourselves during these months of wind chills and ice. It's that character-building urge to try and become more hardened and adaptable. So, I have this coat and hat on and we're patiently waiting for the weatherman to tell us that we're in for something, that reality's going to finally set in and the extended Indian summer thing is definitely over.
Should we, however, prefer to ignore any of this occurring and rather live as if we were hibernating, dreaming of pool parties and BBQs, we could simply listen to Janka Nabay & The Bubu Gang. We would peel off our coats and throw our stocking hats into the trees for we would roast otherwise. Nabay, the Sierra Leone native, now living in Brooklyn, makes you want to strip your shirt off and go bare-chested, wearing some swim trunks and nothing else. He temps you with this notion - and it's one that you created in your head, thought you hope it's true - that there's enough rum punch for everyone, no matter where you might find him. He will drink with you, brother. He we dine with you and he will listen to you. You will listen to him and you'll sense the beautiful energy in the day and the night and it will mean that you're not going to have to return to that cold cruel world you left. Once you leave through those doors, you'll need that coat again and that hat's going to come in very handy. The way that he makes you feel, even when it's coming from a hardscrabble place, can't last forever, just like this fake fall can't.