Can You Hear Me Now

Note. The underlying article can be found at https://ajprokop.com/2026/08/31/lost-in-the-in-between/

Pip: There is a particular kind of melancholy that arrives in early September, right on schedule, whether you asked for it or not.

Mara: Andrew Prokop is sitting with exactly that feeling in this episode — the uneasy space between what was and what’s coming, from seasonal shifts to the buildings that quietly disappear while you’re looking the other way.

Pip: Let’s start with that in-between place itself.

Lost in the In-Between

Mara: The post opens in that narrow corridor between summer and autumn — not quite one thing, not quite another — and asks what it means to grieve a transition you knew was coming.

Pip: The poem that opens the piece sets the whole mood. “I feel the taste of summer’s last kiss, a fond farewell, a sad goodbye, her warm embrace wears scarlet wings, riding retreat on cool autumn breezes.”

Mara: So the upshot is that loss and beauty are arriving at the same time, in the same weather, and the post spends its length sitting honestly inside that contradiction rather than resolving it.

Pip: He names it directly — holding opposite truths at once. Dreading the end of biking season while genuinely looking forward to what Minnesotans call good sleeping weather. That’s not confusion; that’s just a person paying attention.

Mara: And then the post widens. The Detroit Lakes Pavilion — a 1915 structure that hosted everything from sock hops to Bobby Vee to, improbably, the Yardbirds lineup that briefly contained both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck — was torn down last month. He knew it was coming. Seeing the empty lot still stopped him.

Pip: The detail that gets me is that he never actually went inside. He’s mourning a place he experienced entirely through windows and open doors.

Mara: He names that directly too. “Rather than missing something that was a significant part of my own life, I am missing something that was part of the collective lives of the many people who enjoyed what the Pavilion had to offer.” He calls it inherited memory.

Mara: That’s the real argument of the piece — nostalgia doesn’t require personal ownership. You can absorb an era’s loss without having lived inside it.

Pip: He reaches back to Scottsdale, where he grew up watching a town of ten thousand become a quarter million, dairy farms become subdivisions, desert become golf courses. Change is not new to him. It just never gets easier.

Mara: He quotes Sondheim — “I miss the old views” — and then adds his own line: “The views, the music, the people, the places. I catch nostalgia like a cold.”

Pip: That’s the most efficient diagnosis of a certain kind of temperament I’ve encountered in some time.

Mara: The post closes on something warmer. His four grandchildren, he writes, are in constant transformation — mastering life faster than he can track. They don’t let him stay still, which turns out to be its own form of forward motion.

Pip: Reluctant adaptation, he calls his whole history. Which, honestly, is a more honest description of how most of us move through time than anything more heroic.

Mara: The closing poem lands it — “I find myself lost in the in-between, of seasons, of life, of the before and what has yet to be.” That’s the whole piece in three lines.

Pip: And that in-between feeling is really just where we all live, most of the time.

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Mara: What stays with me is the idea that you can grieve something you never fully possessed — a season, a building, an era.

Pip: Next time, we’ll see what else is waiting on the other side of the threshold.