PAT SUMMITT, 1952--2016
I was drinking after work at a bar in Manhattan, near our SoHo offices where I spend something like a quarter of my life now, when I heard we’d lost Ralph Stanley. Flying home to Los Angeles the next day, I stared out the window in what I could best figure was the general direction of Appalachia, and thought about the edges of the world, the psychic features of the landscape getting machined off by twin implacable marches of time and indifference.
And then I thought about how the good doctor didn’t work all that time, didn’t toil upon this plane for 89 years just to be mourned in rest as though that work couldn’t survive him.