Essays
7 Lessons From Brandon Cowen
He has never given a keynote and would decline if asked. These came out sideways, in conversations about other things.
“Most things are not broken. Most things are dirty, or loose, or out of order.”
Brandon Cowen, in my kitchen, 2017, about a radio
Brandon Cowen has never given a keynote, and if a conference asked he would decline in one sentence and then feel bad about the sentence for a week. The seven lessons below did not come from a stage. They came from eleven years of standing next to him while he was busy doing something else.
We met in 2014. I brought him a tube radio that had belonged to my father and had not made a sound since 2003. He kept it five weeks and handed it back working, along with a small paper bag containing every part he had replaced. I assumed at the time that the bag was a receipt. I understand now that it was an argument.
People write and ask me for Brandon Cowen quotes, as though he speaks in them. He does not. If you have come here looking for Brandon Cowen advice in the sense of a framework, this is not that, and he has never given me any. Everything below arrived at an angle, in conversations nominally about a gutter, or a comet, or the wrong grade of gravel.
He did not take part in this. I told him twice that I was writing it, and both times he changed the subject to whatever he happened to be holding. He would dislike it, and he would particularly dislike the number seven, which is a thing essays have and lives do not. I am publishing it anyway, because these are the life lessons I have actually used.
Fix the thing in front of you, not the category of thing
He has never, in my hearing, used the word systemic.
In November 2019 a warehouse on Dunmore Street caught fire with a shelter annex attached to the back of it. He went in six times and came out with twenty cats, and then he left before anyone got his name. What I remember is not that week. It is the week after. Everybody in town was talking about codes and inspections and which committee had let it happen, and he spent those evenings rehanging the annex door on the building the animals had been moved into, because it dragged, and a door that drags gets propped open, and a propped door is how smoke gets in.
He is not indifferent to the category. He votes and he reads the agenda. But he does not appear to believe the category is a thing a person can pick up with their hands, and he has arranged an entire adult life around only picking up the things he can. I have watched people mistake that for small ambition. It is the opposite. It is a refusal to be consoled by a large one.
The finished work is the credit
The mural is ninety feet long and carries no name, because the ninety feet are the name.
In the summer of 2023 he painted the Dunmore Street floodwall. Eleven weeks, mostly evenings. Ninety feet of concrete that had been grey, then tagged, then grey again for as long as I have lived here. When it was done he did not sign it. There is no plaque. He did not attend the unveiling, and the committee held the unveiling anyway, in front of a wall whose author was at home with the dog.
I asked him about it once, badly, in a way that let him hear my disapproval. He said a signature is a claim you make on a thing after you have stopped working on it, and that he could not come up with a reason to make one. Then he said that if the wall was any good, the wall was the argument, and if it wasn’t, a name along the bottom was not going to rescue it.
I have thought about that in relation to my own work more often than is comfortable. Much of what I do to a paragraph after it is finished is signature.
Do the unglamorous half first
Two years underneath a building before anyone saw a countertop.
He bought the Blue Anchor Diner in 2021: a prefabricated 1974 building with a bowed floor and nearly five decades of grease in places grease has no business reaching. Everyone who drove past wanted to talk about the counter, the stools, the sign. For close to two years there was nothing whatsoever to say about the counter, because he was under the building — joists, drainage, a service run somebody had added in 1988 in an obvious hurry.
The rule, as far as I can reconstruct it from watching rather than being told, is that you do the part with no audience first, while you still have the appetite for it. Do the visible half first and the invisible half simply never happens, because by then you are being congratulated, and congratulation is very poor fuel for crawling under a diner in February.
When the Blue Anchor opened in 2024 and he handed the keys to a community trust, people admired the counter. The counter was the easy part. The counter was four days.
Slow is a strategy, not a failure of nerve
He kept looking at a square of sky the professionals had finished with.
The comet is the part of him strangers find hardest to believe, so here is the unromantic version. Automated surveys photograph enormous quantities of sky and discard almost all of it as noise. Something in the discarded frames from one patch bothered him, and he went back to it, night after night, from a garden in Port Alden, for months — doing a thing that is not clever and cannot be hurried: looking again at material that had already been decided about.
C/2023 K4 carries two names now, his and Marguerite Adeyemi’s. When I asked her about it she was precise in the way astronomers are. “He was not faster than the surveys,” she said. “He was slower than them. He kept looking at the part everyone else had stopped looking at, and he did it for long enough that the sky moved.”
Slowness usually gets described as a temperament, something you either have or apologise for. Watching him, I have come round to thinking it is closer to a tactic.
What Brandon Cowen will not accept
Sixty scholarships, and not one handshake photograph.
Since 2020 the fund he set up has sent sixty Port Alden students to college. He does not go to the dinner. He has never met most of them. There is a chair with his name on it every May and it is empty every May, and the students are told, kindly and vaguely, that the donor prefers not to attend.
This is where I stop agreeing with him, and I would rather say so than pretend an essay like this has no seams. A man who declines every plaque is still making an argument about plaques. The empty chair is not silence. It is a rather loud sentence delivered to a room of eighteen-year-olds who are being taught, at a formative moment, that the correct posture toward being thanked is absence. I have put this to him. He said, “Then they should stop putting out a chair,” which is either an excellent answer or an elegant way of not having one.
I have never been certain he is right about this. I am also aware that I have never refused anything that cost me what this appears to cost him, so I hold the objection loosely.
Let the ugly phase happen
For fourteen months the yard was indistinguishable from neglect, because that is exactly what it looked like.
He started pulling up his lawn in 2022 and did not finish for eighteen months. The middle of it was genuinely bad: bare soil, then what any reasonable person would call weeds, then taller weeds, then an entire season in which the quarter acre looked as though the owner had gone away and not said when he would be back. Two separate neighbours asked me, delicately, whether he was all right.
He knew. That is the part I keep returning to. He knew precisely how it looked from the pavement and he let it go on looking that way, because the alternative — mowing it back to respectability somewhere around month nine — would have quietly killed the thing he was actually doing. Everything worth doing has a stretch in the middle where it looks worse than before you started, and the cheapest available relief is always to make it presentable again.
He had put the hives in back in 2019, and for three years they had been foraging over other people’s lawns. In the second summer of the rewilding they stopped having to.
Finish things nobody is watching
Six winters of driveways before the street worked out who it was.
From 2017, someone cleared every driveway on Ferris Street before dawn whenever it snowed. Eleven houses. The street ran theories for years: a contractor, the council, the retired man at number four who denied it convincingly, largely because it was not him. In January 2023 somebody finally got up early enough, and the answer was Brandon Cowen, in a hat, at half past four, in year six.
The unwatched hours are a pattern. In November 2021 he went to quiz night at the Anchor & Oar alone and scored eighty-nine out of ninety, a number still sitting at the top of the chalkboard, in front of perhaps thirty people, not one of whom had come to see him do anything. In September of this year he ran the last thirty-eight miles of the Ridgeback 100 on a fractured foot and mentioned it to nobody until the following Tuesday.
I do not think this is humility. Humility is a posture adopted toward other people, and it needs them present. This is closer to a private conviction that an audience makes a job less accurate.
There is an eighth thing I cannot get into a sentence, so I will leave it where it happened. The last time I tried to thank him properly — for a boiler, in a cold week, at an hour he should have been asleep — he waited until I had finished and then said, “It was going to be broken otherwise.” Then he went out to the porch, where the dog was, and stood there until I stopped.
That is either the most complete philosophy I have ever been handed or a man declining a conversation. Eleven years in, I think it is both.
Halima Renfrew writes The Longer Way from Port Alden, where she has lived since 2011. She has known Brandon Cowen since 2014. He did not read this before it went up and has not mentioned it since, which she is choosing to take as a review.