Advanced tickets are now available on the museum website and HERE.

©October Danko, courtesy of The THOMAS FRASIER GALLERY

SFMoMA is closed on Wednesdays.

ONE.

My name is Joseph Harper and if there is one thing you should know about me, it is this: I am not a brave man.

Over the course of my thirty-seven living years I have been called a lot of respectable things: intelligent, sensitive, even good-looking and gifted. But not brave.

Never brave.

And now, a confession. One I’m not proud of. I was recently asked to leave the Whitefish Community Library in Whitefish, Montana, due to intoxication. It wasn’t even lunchtime yet, and the three shots of tequila I’d had before I got there began to hit me in an obvious and somewhat disorderly way.

I am not brave, I said to no one. I have never been brave.

I was alone in a warm, light-filled corner of the Botany section, on a leather recliner where, to my left, outside the window, the leaves of an aspen tree were announcing the steadfastness of spring. That settled me for a moment. Spring. Rebirth. New beginnings. But then I noticed the aspen’s eyes trained on mine with what I was certain was disappointment.

“Stop looking at me like that,” I said to the tree, louder than what was considered polite in a library.

I had the footrest up so my feet were comfortably elevated, and there was a rectangular coffee-table book called Remarkable Trees of the World on my lap. I used the book as a desk for my laptop because I found that if I just set the laptop on my legs, it eventually heated up and burned my skin, even through my jeans.

“Mr. Harper, is everything all right?”

Patty, the librarian, had wandered over to check on me. She knew me by name because I had been going there for almost three years to read and write and check my e-mail. The little guest cabin I lived in on Sid’s property didn’t have an internet connection, and even though Sid said I could get one, I never bothered because I didn’t think I’d be staying in Montana long enough to need it.

“Mr. Harper?” Patty said again.

She was wearing her usual camouflage pants, and I said, “Patty, where are your legs?” but she didn’t get the joke.

“Are you all right?”

I wanted to shake my head and tell her that I was most definitely not all right, but I gathered she was aware of this fact, that her question was largely rhetorical. She’d seen me when I was there an hour earlier, and I had been fine then. Well, I’d been sober. We’d exchanged trite pleasantries about the weather, and I was as right as a guy like me can be, which, if right were the whole, is only a fraction. But then I opened my inbox and saw the e-mail from the Thomas Frasier Gallery announcing October’s upcoming Living Exhibit entitled Sorrow, and the fraction halved.