I'd mostly recovered from the first blows of the election reminding me that half this country does not agree with universal human rights. And then this news sent me over the edge again. Have any of you listened to his very last album, "You Want It Darker"? It's heartwrenching. Quite reminiscent in a very strange way of David Bowie's farewell album.

Though I'd heard "Hallelujah"'s many covers, the first time I heard Leonard Cohen himself was back when I was involved in Food Not Bombs, a group of anarchists who used groceries' discarded produce to make public meals, which were cooked in the basement of a synagogue, and distributed in a dirty and somehow still pretty park nearby. There was a boombox on a fridge, and people shuffled their mix CDs and cassettes through it, and one day, the song was "Everybody Knows." I mention this because it was the first time I'd heard a song like that, and because I think L Cohen would approve of this story. The song is grim and angry and bleak and yet beautiful.

That's what my memories of Hartford are. A city that's empty, usually, and dark, but the gardens are beautiful even while overgrown, and we saw a great blue heron land in a pond that was more trash than water, one day. I associate Leonard Cohen very heavily with Rice Boy, and probably always will.

Somewhere in my mind is a memory of Leonard Cohen saying that one day, as a student, he “came across a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca that ruined my life, I am happy to say.” The same is true of Cohen - he showed us the beauty in shadows and dust and broken glass mosaics in the cracks of the roads, and he was honest about the loneliness and the meaning of love and of G-d and of the position of self, and, and, I feel the world is missing something now that he is gone from it.


That was too long, and self-indulgent, but this man's music really has been a central part of my life for a long, long time.