The Tender Bar

by J.R. Moehringer

Life is all a matter of choosing which voices to tune in and which to tune out, a lesson I learned long before most people, but one that took me longer than most to put to good use.

Some people interpreted this tendency as coldness. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Even at seven years old I understood that my mother’s silences and blank faces concealed an emotional cauldron. What seemed a lack of feeling was an overflow, a surge. My mother would slip behind her mask of feigned calm for the sake of discretion, as someone might step behind a screen when changing.

All this searching and longing for the secret of being a good man, and all I needed to do was follow the example of one very good woman.