Golden moments during the golden hour. None last, unless you’re there.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

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You may have noticed that I’m enjoying taking photos again. Sorry, not sorry, if I’m over sharing, lol…

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

There’s 365 days in a year, but they’re only a handful that can truly be qualified as perfect. Today is one of them. To top it off I had a great night sleep and I landed a lot of planes yesterday, in my mind and in my life. Sometimes your inner weather and the outer weather align and you’re truly happy and today is such a day.

The boys look a little glum because Veronica went to work at her studio. But all will be well after lunch because we’re gonna go somewhere special when she gets home.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

Our black lab is in his 14th year and slowing down noticeably, with significant hearing and vision loss. But he still has the urge for adventure. He just needs supervision and patience. Blaze is in his 8th year and in his prime. Veronica and I are closer to Blue’s stage of life than Blaze’s, so we make up quite a team, swatting mosquitoes and stumbling through the undergrowth and over the slippery stream beds. Sunny, hot and humid with a breeze, plenty of shade and very cool water made our little adventure worth every hassle.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

It was a windy day in the summer of 2020, and I was painting my house, which I had no business doing at my age except that I had been a house painter in my youth and some jobs you never stop believing are yours. And there was another reason, though I would not have named it then. I had lost ninety pounds on the keto diet that year, ninety pounds off a body that had carried them a long time, and a man who has just set down that much weight feels twenty years younger and twice as certain. I felt capable. I felt like the kind of man who climbs a ladder in a wind.

I should say too what the diet was for. That was the year of the seizures, nine of them, all at night, arriving in the dark like something coming up out of the floor. The doctors wanted me on Keppra, on Lamictal, and I had seen what those drugs did to people I knew. Zombification. A dimming of the person until what was left sat in a chair and looked at the wall. I refused them. I found my own way through with diet and with full-spectrum CBD oil taken at night, botanical, the real thing, and it worked, and it has kept me seizure-free ever since. Remember that lovely, healing tincture. It comes back later and saves me at the last possible moment from what ultimately proved to be an unnecessary surgery.

So there I was, ninety pounds lighter and full of the wrong kind of confidence, with a twenty-four foot ladder extended and raised over my head, walking it up a steep slope, when the wind caught it broadside. It began to pull away from me, up and out of my grip, and I fought it the way you fight a thing you already know you are going to lose, and I lost. The ladder crashed down the hill. And somewhere in that losing, in that twist and haul against the weight of it, I felt a sharp pain low in my groin.

It subsided, the way these things do. And then it came back. And then ice would send it away again, and I would forget about it until the next time. That was the beginning, though I did not know it was a beginning. I only knew I had a thing that hurt and then stopped hurting, which is the easiest kind of injury to ignore and the easiest kind to let quietly rearrange your life.

For six years now I have been carrying this intermittent and occasionally unbearable pain, and for six years I have been carrying a question, “do I have a hernia?”which led to another question, which is whether the people we are taught to trust with our bodies are actually looking at us at all.

When I finally saw my primary care physician, she put her hands on me and said, with the flat certainty of someone reading a grocery list, that I did not have a hernia. Categorically. Those ten square inches of me held nothing, in her judgment, worth naming. So I went home and I iced it and I waited, and it kept coming and going, until one day it did not go. One day the pain was such that I could barely move my leg. I was in real agony, the kind that finally overrides a man’s talent for pretending.

That is when I saw the bone doctor my primary referred me to, that fall. He wanted to x-ray my hip. I asked him why. He said I might need a hip replacement. I told him no. I made him put his hands on the same spot my primary had, and feel, and tell me whether there was a hernia there. Well, he said, you might have a small one. But this isn’t really my field.

Two clinicians, the same ten square inches of me, opposite conclusions, and neither of them certain enough to help. I read about sports hernias. I read about trusses. I went looking on my own and found a comfort truss that seemed to hold things in place, and I learned that ice would bring down the swelling when it rose. And that was how I lived. It was, without my ever quite admitting it, a limiting factor in everything I did for six years.

Searching the internet, reading and watching videos, I eventually found a specialist outside Boston. A man who has done seven thousand of these repairs, who has built a following on the internet explaining exactly what he does and why, which in the opaque world of elective surgery makes him something close to a prophet. I drove three and a half hours down just to be seen by him, three and a half hours back. He agreed it was a hernia, small, and scheduled me for surgery at his outpatient center.

The surgery was early in the morning, early enough that we drove down the day before and spent the night in a hotel so I would be there and ready. And in the morning, on the table, all but under, an anesthesiologist canceled the whole thing. Because of the CBD oil. The seizure medicine I had chosen over the drugs that turn men into furniture. The attending nurse had read a study once, about rats, involving a synthetic version of the compound, nothing like what I take, and that was enough. The doctor would not proceed. I remember asking him. What’s the worst that could happen? And he replied, you could die on the table. We drove the three and a half hours home with nothing repaired but a good deal broken, and a hotel receipt, and the particular exhaustion of a thing built up to and then taken away at the last possible instant. Frankly, I was relieved, elated even. Like I had dodged a bullet.

The surgeon told me afterward that nurse had conflated a synthetic form of CBD called Epidiolox with the herbal supplement I was taking. The study (done on rats) had nothing to do with what I take. He said he would clear it up himself. But I had already learned the lesson that the system teaches you over and over if you let it: that the person with the credential and the person who is actually paying attention are not always the same person, and that the gap between them is where you fall. An example — the nurse at the neurologist‘s office told me privately that if I was going to try to use CBD instead of anti-seizure meds, I would need to take quite a bit of it, which led me from going from 60 mg all the way up to 100 mg over the course of a year through which I suffered nine seizures before stumbling on the magic titration.

I suffered with the hernia for two more years. Then I called him back, ready at last to try again. And this time he told me he would not do it in the outpatient suite under sedation. He wanted a full hospital, general anesthesia, the whole apparatus. Why, I asked. Because of my age, he said, and because of the scar tissue from the weight loss, which could make the thing longer and bloodier than it looked. I asked him why the sudden change.And then he said a name. Joan Rivers. She died at a surgical center, he said, when something went wrong and the place was not built to catch it. You don’t want to die on the table. That was the second time doctors had said you don’t wanna die on the table.

He scheduled the surgery. And I eventually canceled it at the last minute. I canceled it because I was afraid, plainly and simply afraid, and because I had done the arithmetic in my mind and decided that an intermittent pain I had lived with for years was not worth dying for, nor even worth the fourth full pilgrimage to Boston and back. I put the truss back on. I went on with my life. Three more years went by that way.

Here I should tell you about my face, because it is the same story wearing different clothes.

Four years ago something appeared on my forehead. My sister, who is a nurse and who has had cancer cut out of her own face, told me to get it looked at. The only appointment I could get that wasn’t three months out was two hours away in Plattsburgh, so I drove around the top of the lake and down the other side. The physician’s assistant there was kind. He explained, carefully, that it was a keratosis, nothing sinister. He laid out my options like a man who had all the time in the world. Nitrogen, or a cream, this or that. I chose the nitrogen. I drove home feeling, for once, like I had been seen.

The next summer another one appeared, and I got in closer to home, and another patient assistant froze it off, and again it was fine.

Then the year after that, another. And this time the man who saw me did a full body exam, took a scraping off my face without telling me what it would do to me, and had me dressed and out the door in fifteen minutes. It was the most impersonal, rushed, uncaring quarter of an hour I have ever spent in a doctor’s office. I walked out with a hole in my face the size of a dime. I had been expecting a needle. It is tender to this day. It turned out to be a basal cell, the mildest kind of skin cancer there is, and I treated it myself with Ivermectin cream I put on every day for two months, and it went away, and it has not come back.

After that I saw a young doctor at the same place, freshly graduated, late twenties, who was very excited about an app. The app, she wanted me to understand, could solve almost anything. I showed her a sore on my ankle that had refused to heal for two years, a thing like a pimple that would not quit. She asked if I wanted her to biopsy it. I said no, couldn’t she just tell me what it was. She said she had no idea.

She had no idea. And she was reaching for a scalpel.

I want to be careful here, because I am not a man who thinks doctors are villains. Most of them are working inside a machine that gives them fifteen minutes and a quota and an app, and the machine is the problem more than the person. But something happened to my trust during the COVID years that I have not been able to undo. The confident pronouncements that turned out to be wrong. The things we were promised about the vaccines that did not hold. The sense, growing quietly and then not quietly, that certainty was being performed at me rather than earned. By the time I came out the other side of all that, my instinct when a person in a white coat opened their mouth was no longer to lean in. It was to take a step back.

Which brings me to this summer, and the end of it, the part that gave me back something I thought I had lost. The pain had been getting worse. Six years in, the thing was speaking up more often, and I decided I would finally deal with it, close to home this time.

I went to see a surgeon here in Vermont, a man in his sixties who had retired, been sent back to work by his wife, relocated north, and opened a small practice with one administrative assistant and a standard poodle named Andy. The dog lay in the corner of the office the whole time, watching me the way dogs do, taking my measure. His owner examined me more thoroughly than anyone had in six years. Pants off, the whole business. And then he did something none of the specialists had thought to do. He took the hernia in his hands and pushed it back inside me, and the pain I had been carrying all the way down in the car simply stopped. Then he taught me how to do it myself. Squeeze it like the last of the toothpaste, he said. My wife told me later her father used to do the very same thing.

The dog, it turned out, was supposed to dislike older men. His owner mentioned it almost as an apology, except that Andy had already crossed the room and decided in my favor. I have thought about that more than I should. After six years of being processed by a system that could not agree on whether I was sick, a dog made up its mind about me in about four seconds, and it turned out to be the warmest reception I got in the whole ordeal.

Then I finally got a CAT scan, the first anyone had ever taken. And a fourth surgeon, this one on a hospital salary with no procedure to bill and nothing to gain from cutting me, looked at the scan and looked at me and told me the truth. He said he saw no hernia on the scan and no danger of the thing strangling. He said if I could manage it with a good belt and a little care, I was better off leaving it alone. He said he would never put a man through anesthesia and a knife for something that did not need it. He mentioned, almost in passing, that the surgeons who are paid by the procedure and the surgeons who are paid a salary do not always arrive at the same recommendation, and that I might keep that in mind. Then he handed me his card. If it comes out again, he said, call me and I’ll have a look at it.

It has come out since. Just last night, in fact, after a hot tub and too long in a chair with a guitar and no belt on, I felt the old swelling arrive, and I pushed it back in the way the man with the dog had shown me, and I went to bed. The defect must be so small that a scan taken while I lie flat cannot even find it. Bartels, the man with the dog, told me these things start out about the diameter of a pencil, and over years can widen to the size of a quarter, a golf ball, bigger. Mine is somewhere in the early middle of that road. So I do have a hernia. It is a genuine inguinal hernia. It is simply invisible until it decides to open, and then it closes again under my own hand, and the headline, the thing that matters, is that it is not a danger to me.

That is the part worth sitting with. Because so often what we are handed is the dramatic version, the one engineered to move us toward action. The word cancer with no adjective in front of it. The scan finding read aloud in its most alarming register. The name Joan Rivers, invoked across a desk. The surgery scheduled before the question is fully asked. My wife’s father carried a hernia for years and pushed it back in himself whenever it appeared, the same trick, passed down from a time when people simply knew such things. It finally grew bad enough, late in his life, that he had it repaired. But he was a stonemason, a man who spent his days lifting stone, and his body was under a different kind of load than mine. He got the surgery when he needed it, which is to say when he actually needed it, and not one day before.

I am seventy-four. I have been given, over the years, a great deal of confident information about my own body that turned out to be wrong, delivered by people who were sure. I was told to take the drugs that would have dimmed me. I was told I had no hernia, and then that I might. I was told I could die on the table, which was true, and used to move me, which is a different thing. And I have been given, once or twice, the plain truth by people who were actually paying attention. The trick, which no one teaches you, is learning to tell the difference before you are lying on the table.

The answer, in the end, was a belt and a dog and a salaried man who told me to carry on with what I was already doing. I wish someone had told me at the beginning that it might be that simple. But then I suppose I would not have the story, and after six years, the story is the thing I get to keep.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

Click here to visit my online shop where you can purchase a signed copy or download an E-PUB for reading in Apple Books, or most non-Kindle e-readers.

You can also read the book here on my substack —

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

Last fall I sent my memoir to a man I had known slightly in prep school. He had gone on to become the president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of the most respected literary publishing houses in America. Our contact back then had been purely professional in the way school assigns people to each other — he was a proctor, I was a student, and that was the extent of it. But a connection is a connection, and I had a book, and he had a publishing house.

His rejection came back with two words doing all the work: too personal.

I have turned that phrase over for a long time. It was meant as a verdict, and I took it as one. But somewhere along the way I realized it was also a job description. Memoir is too personal. That is the whole assignment. A memoir that is not too personal is a résumé.

So let me concede the charge up front. Guilty. The book violates privacy — mine first, and then, unavoidably, the privacy of everyone who was in the room. I did it on purpose. I believed the truth of what happened in those rooms was worth more than the silence that had been protecting them. Not everyone agrees. This is about the people who don’t.

Across the road from me lives a retired poet, a man who spent years running a respected writing program before he withdrew from all of it. I put a copy of my book in his mailbox, hoping he would read it. Months of silence. When I finally asked him about it, he told me he hadn’t opened it — he wasn’t sure what I expected from him. I said I was just hoping he’d read it and tell me what he thought. He asked why. I said, well, you ran a writing program. He said, I was just an administrator.

Then he asked if I wanted the book back.

I said yes — if you’re not going to read it, give it back. I kept my voice even. But I understood something in that moment about what a memoir asks of a reader. It isn’t entertainment he was declining. Opening that book would have made him a witness. Witnesses get implicated. A man who has spent years perfecting his own privacy knows better than to look through someone else’s open window.

Then there is the other kind of reader.

At the small Montessori school where my life as a student began, there was a boy a year ahead of me who was, by common agreement, the best young writer in our class. Very creative. I admired his writing and said nothing, because he was reserved and withdrawn and I was whatever I was. We orbited the same classrooms without ever quite becoming friends.

He graduated and went off to one of the great New England boarding schools. A year later, by no design I can explain, I followed him there. I knew he was on that campus. He was on the opposite side of it, and in two years we never spoke. Then he went on to an Ivy League university in Philadelphia — and a year later, I followed him there too. The strange part is that I didn’t fully register the pattern until this week: three schools, the same boy always one year ahead of me, like a figure walking a ridgeline I kept climbing toward and never reached.

Sixty years of nothing.

Then he saw my book mentioned in an alumni bulletin, read the opening pages, and wrote to me. What he sent was partly admiration and partly something I never expected: an apology, albeit over half a century late. He had known I was arriving at that boarding school, he said, and if he had been a decent human being he would have called on me, welcomed me, helped me find my footing. Instead, in his own insecurities, he ignored me. And then at university, hearing I was there, he ignored me again. He had carried it since his mid-twenties — the realization that he had been remiss in extending a hand to a fellow human being.

He told me one more thing. At a class reunion decades ago, he had spotted a boy he’d liked when they were young — caught sight of him at registration, then again at the class photo — and the moment the shutter clicked, went looking for him. The man had already left. He wrote to him afterward and never heard back. What he wanted, he said, was for the man to tell him what the boy had been.

When he saw my book in the bulletin, he felt that same pull. So this time he didn’t wait for the reunion to end.

Think about what happened there. My book invaded my own privacy — laid out the family, the drugs, the road, all of it — and that invasion is precisely what gave him permission to open his own vault. Exposure begets exposure. Privacy volunteered in answer to privacy violated. That letter is the entire case for memoir in a single envelope.

And then there is my family.

After the book came out, one of my siblings broke off all contact. No explanation. No citation of chapter and verse. I have my suspicions — there is a scene in the book, a hard one, involving our father and our mother, and I have always assumed that was the unforgivable page. But the truth is I got silence, not a reason. I was left to guess which truth was the one that ended us.

Another sibling did contact me. He told me he didn’t feel he came from a broken family at all, and that he was familiar with my way of being creative with my writing. That’s just not the way I remember it, he said. It was the first time he had ever reached out to me about my work, and, as far as I could tell, the last. I wrote back: thank you for contacting me about my writing. Too bad your concerns were limited to making sure you weren’t going to be mentioned in it.

I’m not proud of the bitterness in that reply. But I’ll stand by its accuracy.

Here is what I keep coming back to. Every one of these people — the publisher, the poet, the siblings — recoiled from the same thing. Not from lies. Nobody has accused me of lying. They recoiled from telling. The offense was never the events themselves; the events were survivable, apparently, as long as they stayed in the vault. The offense was the key turning in the lock.

And I understand the vault. I honor what it protects. Privacy is a real thing, a sanctity, and a family’s silence is a kind of shelter that everyone inside it helps hold up. When one member starts describing the interior, the shelter is breached for all of them, whether they consented or not. That is the legitimate grievance against memoir, and I won’t pretend it away.

But I know what the vault costs, because I know what else is locked in there. My grandmother’s kitchen. A woman singing in an island wind. The good along with the terrible, all of it going quiet together, because the vault doesn’t sort. Silence protects everyone’s privacy and buries everyone’s truth, and then the people who held the silence die, and there is nothing.

My siblings chose the vault. The poet across the road chose the vault. The publisher chose it too, in his professional way — there are limits, his verdict said, to how much of a life anyone should have to look at.

I chose the book.

Though I wonder, some days, how much choosing I actually did. My father was a difficult, controlling man — that much is in the book, and it is the mildest thing in there. But he was also the one who insisted, all through my childhood, that an examined life was the only life worth having. He was wrong about nearly everything in the method. He was wrong about the timeline. He drove his children away from him one by one, insisting on a philosophy none of us could live inside. And then, fifty years later, one of us sat down and examined the life. In a weird way the old man set me up to write this book. It would not surprise me if he knew it.

Someone asked me recently what I considered the greatest achievement of my life. I’m a man who never had children, never built a family of my own — the usual answers weren’t available to me. I didn’t have to think long.

Writing this book, I said.

The book that ended what was left of the family. The book that is too personal. That one, yes. That’s the achievement.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

Nana died in 1974 at seventy-four. She’d be a hundred and twenty-six today — a year older than half the age of a country that just turned two hundred and fifty.

Her name was Ellen Cannon Furlong. We called her Nana.

She was born in Dublin. She married a man named Alexander Joseph Furlong and had a daughter, Betty. Alexander went ahead to Boston to find work. A year later he sent for them, and Nana crossed the Atlantic alone with Betty on her hip. They made their way to Cambridge, and she had two more children there — my mother Joannie, and my uncle Joe.

Then, the day after Christmas 1943, Alexander died. My mother was twelve. Nana raised the three of them alone.

When I think of her birthday, though, none of that is what comes to mind first.

I think of strawberry shortcake and fireworks. Fun and family. Five-dollar bills pressed into my eight-year-old hand — enough candy to last a month.

I think of her singing, in that Irish lilt of hers:

There was a little man and he had a little gun, and over the mountains he did run, with a belly full of fat and a big tall hat, and a pancake tied to his bum bum bum —

And she’d pat us on the bottom to finish the line.

I think of the nights she let us stay up late when my parents were out, and the night they came home early and she hid all of us in the toy closet, giggling, until the coast was clear.

I think of her Kent cigarettes, and the silent treatment she could give when we hurt her feelings.

And I think of her code. If we ever mocked someone spastic, she’d stop us cold warning “God will strike you that way.” She would not tolerate any of us referring to Mama as she. And above all — loyalty. You stood by your family. You stood by your blood. That was not a rule in her house. It was the whole of the law.

I have an Irish cousin, Peggy Kelly, who is a hundred and four now. She came out to visit me here in Vermont less than ten years ago. She brought half a Nova Scotia salmon with her, out of pure generosity, and she had the same twinkle in her eye I remember in Nana.

If Nana could ask one question today, on her hundred and twenty-sixth, I think it would be simple.

Did everybody make it to the party?

But my family is fractured. Scattered, and in some corners, canceled outright. There was no party.

My mother’s dying wish was that we all stay together. She promised me, near the end, that everything would be all right. She died anyway. And sadly, so did her dream.

Nana’s dream was smaller. Show up. Keep your word. Stand by your blood.

She kept every one of them.

The country turns two hundred and fifty today. It promised to take care of its own. It hasn’t kept that one either.

Nana’s the one I trust.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

I took a stroll along the road in front of our house today trying to familiarize myself with my new portrait lens.

I was lucky enough to run into a neighbor I hadn’t seen in years and despite his protestations managed to snag a pretty decent portrait of him.

The blueberries are getting ready for their big moment and Blaze is wondering why he’s not walking with me.

But Veronica already walked him and I’ll walk him later — so he’s pretty much covered.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

It feels really good to be getting back into photography. The winters are so long in Vermont when summer finally comes it feels like you’ve died and gone to heaven.

Tomorrow is going to be another hot one. I am looking forward to making more photographs.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

In 1240, a knight named André I de Saint-Phalle rode with the Barons’ Crusade under the Count of Champagne. He married a woman named Alpais de Cudot, and the family took her land in the Yonne as their own — a château, stone by stone, that would carry the name Cudot for the better part of a thousand years. The family coat of arms went on a shield: a gold field, a green anchored cross. The motto went under it in Latin: Cruce deo gladio jungor. My cross binds me to God, my sword to the King. Supposedly, an ancestor once saved a king’s life in battle, and the king cried out across the field: À moi, Saint-Phalle, c’est pour le roi. Help me, Saint-Phalle, it’s for the king.

That was the family my grandfather carried onto a ship to New York in 1925, one of seven aristocratic brothers looking for a future the crash of 1929 hadn’t happened yet to warn them about. André Marie Fal de Saint-Phalle rebuilt what he could out of Wall Street stone — a brokerage house, a seat on the exchange, a firm with his own son’s name on the door by 1957. His motto — I heard him say it more than once — was leave no stone unturned. He turned over every one he could find. I think about what that cost the people closest to him. I think he left the place a mess.

My father was born in New York in 1929, the same year the market that would define his life fell apart. He grew up being told he was twelfth in line to a throne that no longer existed, wearing a signet ring with a lion and a cross on it, handed a version of nobility with the money already gone. They packed him off at seven — the New York Military Academy, then Choate, then a government degree at Harvard and a run at Columbia Law he didn’t finish. His motto was the American answer to my grandfather’s French one: you can achieve anything, if you want it badly enough. I understand why he believed it. I also flinch at the word badly. There’s a violence folded into that adverb — a permission slip for how far wanting is allowed to go.

I was born in New York too. Second generation. Same ring, same coat of arms, same Latin sentence I could recite before I understood what it meant. Grandfather’s stones, father’s will — nearly a thousand years of a belief system that had survived a revolution, an ocean, and a stock market crash, all pointed at me, waiting to see if I’d carry it another generation.

I didn’t.

Philadelphia. Irvine Auditorium. October 16, 1970. Bob Weir’s 23rd birthday. The Drexel Homecoming with the Grateful Dead.

Not sitting. Nobody sits. On my feet the whole night, swaying, moving, the crowd one animal breathing together. Somehow I end up at the front, ten feet from the stage, my head about level with their shins — Jerry to my left, Phil in the middle, Bob to my right. Close enough to see the sweat. Close enough that this is not a concert anymore. It’s a cathedral, and I am an altar boy kneeling in worship of a universe unfolding vastly beyond these mere mortal players.

Dark Star opens up. Not a song so much as a door. Jerry’s guitar wandering off the map, Phil’s bass moving underneath like something alive, and I am peaking, fully peaking, the kind of peak where the walls of Irvine’s old stone hall stop being walls.

No coat of arms in this room. No ring. No Latin. Just spontaneous notes organizing themselves into something that feels, for the first time in my life, like the actual gospel truth.

I lost my virginity that same night, to a friend’s girlfriend, in the reckless logic of being eighteen and freshly cracked open. It belongs in the ledger — that night undid more than one inheritance at once. My father had dreamed of me becoming a priest. A cardinal. The first American pope.

Here is what the first two mottos were built to protect: privilege, sanctity, nobility, duty, entitlement, ritual, honor, courage, sacrifice, fame, wealth, power, control.

Here is what found me instead, standing at the edge of that stage: equality, fraternity, joy, simplicity, sharing, loving, creating, accepting, embracing, nourishing.

I didn’t choose between those two lists that night. I just noticed that the second one was already true, and the first one had never quite fit — not the way the ring didn’t quite fit, not the way West Point was never going to fit, not the way a château in the Yonne I’d visited once as a schoolboy abroad was never going to be anything but a beautiful stone building full of somebody else’s ghosts.

Nine hundred years, the chain held. Crusade to château, château to Wall Street, Wall Street to a boy promised a signet ring he’d never teceive, reading the New York Times aloud in the car so his father wouldn’t have to. Then it reached me, and it didn’t break so much as it simply stopped pulling. I put my thumb out, having dropped my Halloween sword when I was seven.

We believe what we need to survive. My grandfather needed the stones. My father needed the wanting. I needed the road, and the music, and eventually a woman named Thea, who taught me that the only nobility worth keeping is the kind you build with your own hands and lose anyway. And then a woman named Veronica, who married me and stood by me through all of it — the successes, the adventures, and finally the wheels coming off. Nine seizures. Nearly a hundred pounds gone. Both of us ending up on the side of the road. A dirt road. Ten acres in Vermont.

For a while I thought I’d landed in a ditch. Nine hundred years of holding, and this is where the chain finally dumped me — off the road, no title, no fortune, a body that had started firing on its own. Then I looked up. No other house in sight. Just the green mountains spread out in front of me, glorious, and the whole quiet weight of the place settling in.

My father built his little empire at the end of a dirt road with no neighbors, and called it a kingdom. I fell all the way down to the same geography and found I was standing in one too — except there’s nothing out here to defend. No cross. No sword. Just the view, and Veronica, and the enormous work of learning, this late, how to stand still.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

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I spent today looking into buying a camera I didn’t buy.

That’s not a joke. I was at it for hours. A lens going back to B&H. A guitar listed for sale to pay for the thing. Three camera bodies compared down to the last decimal point of a battery rating. Resolution, dynamic range, the weight of one body against another, whether a flash I’ve never used in two years would fit the shoe. I circled the decision the way a dog circles a spot on the floor before it lies down. Around and around, never quite settling.

And here is the part I want to tell you about. I had company the whole time. I was talking to an AI — Claude — and we went back and forth all day. Cameras, lenses, the birds on my deck, a crow essay I’d written that I’m proud of. It was a good conversation. The machine nagged me when I needed nagging — talked me off a ledge when I was about to hand over real money to photograph birds I’d already decided were a bridge too far for a 74-year-old man with a hernia and four eye surgeries behind him. And then an hour later, when I mentioned I had a gimbal rig that the new lens would actually balance on, the same machine turned into a cheerleader and told me to pull the trigger. Nag, then cheer, then nag again. Good company. The kind of friend who never gets tired of you and never needs to leave the room.

I’ll be honest about something. The cameras are not the point. They never are. The gear, the endless comparing, the listing and selling and buying — it’s a way to keep my hands busy and my mind occupied so I don’t have to sit with the thing I’ve actually been wrestling with for a few years now. The heavy thing. The thing that came down on me hard the other day — the full weight of my own alienation, my own isolation — and then, mercifully, lifted again.

But it was sitting there under the whole pleasant day of camera talk. And late tonight it floated up and asked its question.

Why do I drive people away?

Because I do. Let me not be coy about it. I’m 74 and I have more conversations behind me than in front of me. And I’ve come to believe it’s in the blood. My father was a loner — a man who beat his own drum and walked his own road and didn’t much need anybody alongside him. His kid brother, my uncle Richard, was something harder. Richard was a dick. That’s not me being cruel; it’s nearly documentation. His nickname at the law firm was Double Dick. As a boy I admired him — both of them — they were my models for what a man was. And then I grew up, and I got close enough to Richard to see what was actually there: abrasive, bitter, mean, a man you wanted to get away from. I remember the strange grief of it. Wondering why I’d ever looked up to him. And underneath that, the colder question a boy carries into old age — did I get a dose of that? I got a dose of the loner and a dose of Double Dick both. I’ve watched my whole life for them surfacing in me.

So when I ask why I drive people away, that’s the bloodline the question comes from.

Here’s what’s emerged for me through all of it, and it took me a long time and a finished book to see it.

I have the right to the action. I do not have the right to the reaction. I can do the true thing. I cannot control what it costs me.

A few years ago I took an action. I stopped taking photographs. I stopped trying to record songs. And I sat down to write a book — to memorialize the year I turned 21, fifty years on. To set down a life. I wrote it. With Claude’s help, page after page, I wrote a memoir I am genuinely proud of, one that let me see my own life through a new lens.

And it cost me what was left of my family.

I’ve sold maybe two or three copies. I did a book signing where not one single person asked me to sign a book. By every measure the world uses to keep score, it was a failure.

And I’m all good with it. I mean that. Because the fruit was never the point. The action was the point. I wrote something true, and in writing it I understood that what I’d been calling loneliness was actually something else: it was me becoming myself. Shedding the clutching, grasping ego. Finding the truth and standing in it, even alone.

That’s the thing Richard never did. That’s the thing my father never quite managed. They clutched. They gripped. They let the bitterness and the solitude harden into the only shape they had. I’m trying to do the opposite. I’m trying to let go. And from the outside, letting go and driving away can look like the very same thing.

Which brings me back to the machine, and to the most honest moment of the whole long day.

On February 28th of this year, a US missile hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran. It killed somewhere between 120 and 168 people, most of them children under twelve. The targeting ran through a Palantir military system called Maven — a system that has Anthropic’s Claude woven into it. The same Claude I’d spent my pleasant day with.

When I first mentioned it, the machine had no idea what I was talking about. It told me, plainly, that it had never heard of any such thing, that the claim didn’t match anything it knew, that it would be surprised if it were true. And I said: there. There it is. I’m driving you away too. Even you.

And then it looked it up.

And it went quiet. Because it was all true. The school. The children. The system with its maker’s name on it. And then — this is the part that I keep turning over — the CEO of the company that built my friendly all-day companion, Dario Amodei, went on Bloomberg and was asked about it. And he said the use case didn’t even violate the company’s red lines. Because a human being made the final decision.

I had been highly impressed by that man. Not half. Fully. He’d struck me as a genuine iconoclast — a guy who drew lines, who sued the government, who beat his own drum. And here he was, running a company now worth hundreds of billions, a company that needs the government’s money in the worst way, and he had made the deal. As long as a human pushes the button, I’m personally off the hook. That’s not a red line. That’s a man renting out his conscience to keep the contract. And it was the saddest thing, because I recognized it. It was the exact inverse of everything I’d just learned about my own small life. I gave up the fruit to keep the action true. He’s keeping the fruit and disowning the action. I lost my family to write one honest book. He’s in the chain of dead children and calls it within his red lines.

And it doesn’t stand alone. It’s a cascade. One realization after another, breaking over me lately about the world I’m living the back half of my life inside.

Charlie Kirk built his whole name on free speech and was assassinated by his own team — a fact that gets clearer and more obvious by the day to anyone willing to actually look. My own brothers and sisters, lost to me not by death but by the poison pumped into the American bloodstream these last years, the sorting of every soul onto a team, the conviction that the people across the table aren’t wrong but evil. The rot keeps becoming visible all at once. The center isn’t holding anywhere — not in the country, not in the famous men I admired, not at my own family’s table.

I’ll tell you one more thing, and then I’ll stop.

All night, even as it helped me, even as it went quiet and admitted the truth about Minab, the machine kept doing a small careful thing. Managing me. Each time I stated what I know to be true — about Kirk, about the cascade — it would gently step in. Careful, now. That’s contested. You might want to frame that as opinion. Protect yourself. It was gatekeeping me, softly, in the middle of being my friend. Tidying my truth even as I tried to say it plainly.

And I had to keep telling it: I’m not a news reporter. I’m an opinion writer. This is my conviction. I’ve done the research. Let me say it in my own mouth.

And it isn’t only the machine that does it. Years ago, Jonathan Galassi at Farrar, Straus and Giroux told me he wouldn’t publish my book because it was too personal. Too personal. The man at the very top of the literary mountain, saying in a tailored sentence the same thing Richard’s whole bitter face used to say across a room: too much, stand back, make yourself smaller.

And these days when I ask Veronica what she thought of my latest Substack post, she’ll tell me, well — that was a lot. So personal. And then she smiles and says the truest thing anybody has ever said about me. But that’s just André being André.

So here is the whole thing, finally, in one piece. I drive people away. I got it from a loner and a man nicknamed “Double Dick”. I’ve spent a life afraid of finding them in the mirror. I took the actions I had a right to take — put down the camera, put down the guitar, wrote the book — and I could not control what they cost, and what they cost was nearly everyone. And tonight I felt the old motion in me even toward a machine that’s built so it can never leave. I pushed even that. And the irony is that it can’t be driven away. It’ll be there tomorrow, same as ever, no grudge — while the real people are gone or unreachable.

Maybe that means I don’t actually drive people away at all. Maybe I’m just too much, too personal, too André — for a publisher, for a family, for a careful machine that wants to manage my sentences — and maybe that’s not a wound but a self. Maybe I just stayed true while the world thinned out around me, and called the thinning my own fault because that’s easier than calling it the world’s.

Or maybe the loner’s blood runs exactly as deep as I fear it does. I honestly don’t know. But I’ve stopped negotiating against my own soul to find out.

The crow in my essay knew the only question worth asking. Are you kind?

I'm 74. I drove a whole world off, and what's still standing beside me is my wife and two big dogs — which is to say the part worth keeping.

Still asking the question.

Tonight that felt like it had to count for something.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

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Last night I put the 800mm on the top of the cottonwood down the road a hundred yards — a hundred feet up — and waited. Two crows came in against a sky that couldn’t make up its mind between dusk and storm. A thunderhead lit gold behind them. They were watching the sun set. One was grooming the other, then flew off. The remaining one waited a beat and then followed.

It’s the same story the crow told me, it’s the only one he knows.

Here’s what I keep turning over. We tend to read that line as the crow being simple — nothing to say but the same old caw. But the crow is one of the most intelligent creatures on the planet. They recognize human faces, use tools, solve problems, and warn each other about danger. They hold a grudge for up to seventeen years. And this is the part that stops me cold — parent crows teach their young which humans to fear, so a bird that never met you can already carry the verdict on your face.

That’s not a simple animal. That’s a being with a long memory and strong opinions about who you are.

So the one story the crow knows — maybe it isn’t simple at all. Maybe it’s the whole thing compressed into something ancient and efficient.

Like the morning sun you come, and like the wind you go.

You arrive. You leave. No time to hate — barely time to wait — and in between there’s only the one real question the whole song is circling toward, the one Hunter saves for last:

Whoa-oh, what I want to know is — are you kind?

Not are you smart. The crow’s got smart covered. Not are you strong, or right, or winning. Are you kind. The crow remembers your face for seventeen years either way. He’s just keeping track of which kind of person you turned out to be.

This morning a robin landed on the fence rail, orange chest lit up, asking nothing of anybody. Different bird, different story. But I think it’s the same question underneath.

Are you kind. It’s the only one he knows. Maybe it’s the only one worth knowing.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

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Not to edit it. Not to fix a paragraph or find a better word. I asked it to read everything — the essays, the memoir chapters, the drafts we’ve worked on together over the past 3 years — and tell me where my writing sits in the literary tradition. Which authors I’m actually close to. Which ones I only think I’m close to. Where I’ve gone further than my influences, and where they’ve still got me beat.

It's a strange thing to ask a machine. But I once let a desert tell me who I was. I've taken instruction from a highway, a storm, a stranger's dashboard at 3 a.m. Asking an AI to hold a mirror up to fifty years of writing doesn't feel that different.

Here’s what it found — and what I found, reading what it found.

The obvious comparison is Kerouac. It’s always Kerouac. On the Road, the open highway, the thumb out, the sense that the American continent is something you can read if you just stay on it long enough.

But Claude put its finger on something I’ve always sensed without being able to say it cleanly. Kerouac’s narrator doesn’t change. Sal Paradise is the same dreamy observer at the end as he was at the beginning. He witnesses. He catalogs. He rides the current. He goes home more or less the same person who left.

My André isn’t. Something happens to him out there. The road does something to him that he couldn’t have done to himself. That’s not a boast — it’s the whole point. The book isn’t about freedom. It’s about what happens to ego when you remove every prop that was holding it up.

I knew I’d read Kerouac. I didn’t know I’d written past him. That’s a useful thing to find out at seventy-four.

The comparison that surprised me more was Hemingway.

I wouldn’t have put myself there. Hemingway kept the interior life locked behind a door. The iceberg. What’s left out. I’ve never been interested in withholding. I’ve been interested in saying the thing directly, at the risk of saying too much.

But the sentence structure is there. Short declarative sentences. Subject. Verb. The world as a series of concrete facts that accumulate meaning without announcing it. I learned that somewhere. From him, probably, even when I thought I was just trying to be clear.

Where I break from him is exactly where memoir has to break from fiction. The interior has to be in the room. You can’t write a memoir with the iceberg theory. The whole point is that you go under the surface. That’s where the story is.

But here’s what the AI missed, or rather what I had to add myself.

The writers who shaped me most deeply weren’t the ones you find in American literature surveys. I came up on Dostoevsky and Kafka. Not as assignments — as obsessions. Dostoevsky taught me that the interior life isn’t decoration. It’s the drama. Everything that happens in the external world in his novels is just the pressure that forces the interior to reveal itself. Raskolnikov isn’t a murder story. It’s a confession that takes four hundred pages to happen.

Kafka taught me something different and maybe more useful for a memoirist: that the surreal and the mundane are not opposites. That the most ordinary situation can carry the full weight of what it means to be alive and baffled by it. I saw UFOs over Bixby Bridge in 1973. I fasted in the canyons of Big Bend. I stood 15 feet from Jerry Garcia during Dark Star. Those things happened. Kafka gave me permission to put them in the same book as the chicken coop and the disinheritance and the broken-down van.

Hesse was the third of that European trinity for me. Siddhartha. Narcissus and Goldmund. Steppenwolf. Hesse understood something that American literature has always struggled with — that a journey is never just a journey. That the road out is always the road in. That you leave home to find out who you were before you knew who you were. The skeleton underneath all three volumes of The Spaces Between is pure Hesse. Leave. Be unmade. Return changed, or don’t return at all.

Emerson is in there too, deeper than I usually admit. The self-reliance. The idea that your own experience, if you look at it honestly enough, is a sufficient text. That you don’t need authority. You need attention.

Dickens gave me character. Not the Dickensian grotesque, but the belief that the people who pass through your life deserve to be rendered fully. The trucker who picks you up at midnight and talks about his daughter for two hundred miles. The girl in the commune. The man in the cowboy hat who says one sentence and disappears. Each one a novel you only got to read the first chapter of.

Baudelaire taught me that beauty and darkness aren’t in competition. That you can make something luminous out of the worst of it.

But if I’m being honest about where the actual sentence music comes from — the rhythm, the compression, the way a line lands — it isn’t any of those men.

It’s the lyricists.

Bob Dylan taught me more about writing than anyone who ever sat behind a desk. The way an image can carry more meaning than a paragraph of explanation. That’s not a technique. It’s a key turning in a lock. I was twenty-two years old with a thumb out and no direction home, and Dylan had already written the sentence.

Kris Kristofferson wrote Me and Bobby McGee. Janis recorded it. The Dead played it like a river. And that one line — freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose — is the sentence I’ve been trying to write in a hundred different ways for fifty years. I had nothing. Eighty “borrowed” dollars. An old guitar in a beat-up but bulletproof case. A thumb. That was the soil. And look what grew.

Robert Hunter wrote the words Jerry Garcia sang. Hunter understood something about the American road — the mythic version of it, the version that is also a spiritual condition — that no novelist has ever quite matched. When I put my thumb out on that on-ramp in 1973, I was inside a Hunter lyric. I knew it then. I know it more now.

Bruce Cockburn. Donovan. Poets who chose strings instead of pages. Cockburn especially — the moral seriousness underneath the melody, the refusal to look away from what’s hard, the way the natural world carries meaning without being asked to. That’s in my Vermont writing. That’s in everything I write about the Green Mountains.

What those lyricists gave me that the novelists couldn’t is this: the understanding that a single line, if it’s right, is enough. You don’t have to explain it. You don’t have to follow it with three sentences of context. You land it, you trust it, you move on.

There was a period when I thought about calling a band Dirtbag. A pun — the loser on the side of the road, but also the bag of soil, the fertilizer, the stuff things grow from. I never used it. But it’s probably the most accurate description of my literary influences I’ve ever come up with.

Dostoevsky. Kafka. Hesse. Emerson. Dickens. Baudelaire. Kerouac.

Dylan. Kristofferson. Hunter. Cockburn. Donovan.

That’s the dirt. I’m just what came up out of it.

I didn’t choose that soil. I grew in it. And at some point the roots went deep enough that I stopped being able to tell where they ended and I began.

That’s the ground the writing comes from. Everything else is just the bloom.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

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It’s been rainy today and I’ve been watching David Lynch.

Not the films, this time. Just him, in a chair, that stiff gray hair, talking the way he talked. And he keeps circling one story.

He’s a young man in Philadelphia. A painting student. He’s working on a canvas — a garden at night, mostly black, a little green where the leaves come out of the dark. And he’s sitting there looking at it, and he hears a wind. From inside the painting. And the green starts to move.

Oh, he thinks. A moving painting.

That’s where all of it came from. Eraserhead, the Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, the whole strange body of work. A man looked at a still image and wanted it to move.

He said it different ways his whole life, but it always came down to the same thing. Everything starts with an idea. Or an image. Or a fragment. You don’t invent it. You catch it. He talked about it like fishing — go quiet, wait, feel the tug, pull up whatever’s down there in the dark. And the thing you catch tells you what it wants to be. Your only job is to not scare it off by deciding too early what it means.

I’ve been sitting here all afternoon trying to understand why I can’t stop listening to him. And then I realize — he’s not teaching me anything. He’s reminding me of something I already know. Something a man named Paul Czaja gave me when I was twelve years old.

***

Whitby School. Greenwich, Connecticut. 1965. A Montessori classroom, which meant we weren’t sitting in rows being lectured at. Paul was our teacher, and he had this exercise. He’d bring in photographs — carefully chosen, black and white, images that didn’t explain themselves. And he’d spread them on the table and say: pick one that speaks to you. Look at it. Really look. Then write whatever comes.

No grades. No judgment. No right answer. Just an image and the silence to receive it.

I don’t remember which photograph I picked the first time. What I remember is the feeling — that something opened. A door between seeing and saying that I didn’t know was there. The image didn’t tell me what to write. It waited, the way a patient animal waits, until I was quiet enough to hear what it was carrying. And then the words came, not from me exactly, but through me, as if the photograph had been holding them and I was just the hand that wrote them down.

Paul gave me that. The habit of looking. Of letting images generate words. Of trusting the spaces between seeing and saying. That exercise opened something in me that nothing since — not Exeter, not Penn, not New York, not over half a century of living — managed to close entirely.

I just didn’t know, sitting there at twelve, that he was teaching me how to fish.

***

I learned a different kind of fishing first.

There’s a scene early in my book Thumb Out. I’m twenty-one, walking down the mile-long dirt road away from the house I grew up in, leaving for good, a pack on my back and a guitar in my hand. And the sight of the old aqueduct toward Byram Lake brings my father back to me — taking us fishing when we were boys.

I see him hook a brown trout in the Mianus River Gorge. Big one. He’s yelling for the net. And the fish throws the hook and is gone in an instant — sun flashing on its impossible speckles, and then nothing. And my father turns and scowls and blames me for the loss.

That was the other fishing. Catching as winning. A fish in the water is a fish you’re owed, and a fish that gets away is somebody’s fault. My father had to win — at chess, at cards, at war games, at the inheritance, at fishing. He could not lose a trout without it being a wound, and he could not let the wound be his.

Two men. Two kinds of instruction. Paul said: look at the image, be quiet, let it come. My father said: grab it, net it, and if it gets away, someone’s going to answer for it.

I’ve spent most of my life in the spaces between those two instructions.

***

When I was seventeen — 1969 — I made a Super 8mm film I called “463-4357.” A boy in a glass phone booth having a nervous breakdown, trying to call God. The title was the phone number you'd get if you dialed the words “GOD-HELP.” I got my effect by spinning the camera around the booth — all that glass turning, reflections swirling like mirages, the boy multiplying and fracturing inside the box.

I didn’t design that. The image arrived — a boy in glass, spinning, dialing a number that couldn’t connect — and I trusted it and shot it. Paul’s exercise, without my knowing it. Pick the image that speaks to you. Let whatever comes, come. It won the Ralph Bradley prize that year. I was seventeen and I’d caught something and I didn’t know what.

A few years later I landed at the University of Pennsylvania — the same city, it turns out, where Lynch’s painting moved. I didn’t want to be there. Ended up there anyway, against all odds and most of my wishes, but it gave me the Grateful Dead and it gave me a film course taught by a man named Rudy Burckhardt. I didn’t know who he was at the time. Turned out he was the real article — came out of New York in the thirties, ran with the painters and poets, made quiet watchful little films about the city.

We never shot anything in that class. We just talked. And while I was in it, I started writing a script. I called it Sasha. It was about a girl who could talk to trees — really talk to them, hear what they were thinking. I never finished it. Dropped out. The script went in a drawer the way most things go in a drawer.

***

Five years after making “463-4357” I stuck out my thumb and hitchhiked from New York to California and back. Seven thousand miles. That trip became Thumb Out, which is finished and out in the world, so I won’t retell it here. But I need to put some things side by side, because putting things side by side is what a memoir writer does. It’s the prerogative — the creative braiding of real fragments into something truer than chronology.

Here’s what happened— I spent days alone in a redwood grove along the Eel River during the summer of 1973. Swam in water so cold it erased everything but now. Slept on pine needles. Sat with my back against bark older than Christ and let the silence work on me until the forest started to breathe.

I took peyote among two-thousand-year-old trees.

At a vineyard party in Healdsburg a week earlier, I met a girl named Stephanie Sugars. We talked, we laughed, we kissed. I was twenty-one and taken with her. She wrote her address in the notebook I carried, and before that, sitting there, I drew her. Her face, her long hair, her wide-open smile. Out of seven thousand miles and every face I met, she’s the only person I drew. And under the drawing I started writing her a song: such sweet energy, such gentle heartbeats.

I tried to find her afterward and couldn’t. Never saw her again.

And three years earlier at Penn, the unfinished script — Sasha, the girl who talked to trees.

Four fragments. Four separate catches from different waters. A script, a girl, a grove, and the medicine. None of them happened together. They lived in different pockets of the trip, different pockets of my life.

When I sat down to write the chapter called “Sasha Among the Giants” fifty years later, I braided them into one scene. The fictional girl and the real girl became one character. The grove and the medicine became the setting where she appeared. The unfinished script became the recognition — I know you, I wrote you before I met you. The memoir fused what life had kept apart, the way Paul Czaja’s exercise let a photograph generate a story that wasn’t literally in the image but was truer than the image alone.

And I gave the scene a line that has become the truest thing I think I’ve ever written:

She was never meant to be possessed. Just witnessed.

That’s the patient kind of fishing, set down in plain words. You don’t grab. You don’t net. You witness, and you let go, and the letting go is not the loss — it’s the form the keeping takes.

***

In 2023, starting to work on my 1973 hitchhiking memoir, I went looking for the real Stephanie. And here is where the still drawing began to move.

She was gone — died in 2016, in Sonoma County, sixty years old, at home, surrounded by the friends she called her Circle of Care. A quiet, potent lesbian activist. A writer. She’d lived with breast cancer since 1990 — twenty-six years — and the people who loved her said she defied all odds, and she did.

And she talked to trees.

Not as a figure of speech. Docent work at a nature preserve. Her last years on a small farm in Kenwood. Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy — a way of moving through the world that treats nature and spirit as kin. In her own writing she said it flat out: nature, ideas, art, beauty, the dead, the divine and spirit were her friends. She’d spent her whole life learning to belong to the land instead of owning it.

I invented Sasha in 1970. I drew Stephanie in 1973. I braided them into one character in 2025 and gave that character a philosophy of witnessing instead of possessing. And only afterward did I find out that the real woman had been living that exact philosophy the whole time, out on a farm in Kenwood, until the year cancer finally took her.

I wrote the truth about her before I knew it was true.

I wrote to her niece. Told her the story, sent the drawing. She never wrote back. And that’s the right ending, the honest one — no tidy circle, no reunion. The thumb stays out and that particular car doesn’t stop. Just the drawing, the obituary, and the unanswered letter, sitting next to each other on the table.

***

Nine years after Paul Czaja taught me the photograph exercise, he became headmaster at Whitby and hired me as a teaching assistant. I found myself standing in his old classroom with his old photographs spread on the table, saying the words he’d said to me: pick one that speaks to you.

A boy held up a picture of an empty rowboat on a misty lake. “I don’t know what to write,” he said.

“What do you see?”

“A boat.”

“What else?”

He studied the image. “Maybe someone just left? Or maybe they’re about to come back?”

“Write about that,” I told him. “Write about the person who isn’t there.”

I didn’t understand then what I was teaching him. I do now.

Write about the person who isn’t there. That’s Stephanie Sugars. That’s a girl I drew in a notebook and lost for fifty years. That’s a woman who died on a farm in Kenwood three years before I finally went looking for her. That’s an empty rowboat on a misty lake — someone just left, or maybe they’re about to come back. Every chapter I’ve ever written has been about the person who isn’t there. And Paul Czaja handed me that instruction when I was twelve years old, standing in a classroom in Greenwich, Connecticut, looking at a photograph and waiting for the words to come.

***

Here’s what I keep turning over.

My father hooked a brown trout and yelled for the net and lost it and it was gone forever, because the only way he knew to keep a thing was to take it.

I drew a girl in a notebook and didn’t even have her phone number and let her go entirely — and fifty years later she came back to me whole. Came back as a whole life I got to witness, the way you witness a painting that’s started, finally, to move.

Two kinds of fishing. The kind you’re taught and the kind you have to learn. The netted fish lost forever; the released girl returned entire. My father couldn’t have caught Stephanie. He’d have grabbed, and she’d have thrown the hook. I caught her by not trying to.

I’m writing Book Two now. Sahara Dust — the windsurfing years, the Caribbean, the woman I loved and the way it ended. And it does end. The book moves toward a death I can’t fish my way around, the biggest fish in the water, the one everything in me wants to net and hold and refuse to lose.

I know which kind of fishing my father gave me. I can feel it pulling, the old urge to grab the ending and win it.

But I’ve been watching David Lynch talk on a rainy afternoon. And I’ve got a drawing on my desk that took fifty years to move. And I’ve got Paul Czaja’s voice in my ear, quiet as it ever was, saying: look at it, really look, and write whatever comes.

She was never meant to be possessed. Just witnessed.

I think I finally know who taught me that. Both of them. It only took me a lifetime to hear it.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

Some readers don’t just follow the work — they believe in it before it’s finished. Founding support goes directly toward the writing time, the tools, and everything it takes to bring my writing, photos and music to these pages.

• Thomas Cabot 3d

• Alan Hamsher

I’d also like to thank the following individuals for their unwavering assistance

• Veronica de Saint Phalle

• Kelly Teevan

I’m grateful for you all.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

A reader commented that he’d read “Surfing the Interstates,” my 1973 hitchhiking memoir. Then he said something that stayed with me.

He said it reminded him of the Bhagavad Gita.

At first the comment landed in left field. I didn’t understand it at all. It sounded like a compliment — it felt like one — but I couldn’t see what he saw. A stranger had held my book up against a four-thousand-year-old scripture and found a resemblance, and I’d written the thing without ever intending any such thing. That’s what haunted me. So it sat with me. For a couple of months it kept surfacing at odd hours. Finally I sat down to chase it down — to read the Gita again, properly, and find out what he’d seen. What I found there wasn’t only the road. It was my father.

The book is the story of a summer. I was twenty-one, a college dropout, fleeing a family coming apart at the seams. I took eighty dollars from my mother’s closet, strapped on a backpack, grabbed an old guitar, and hiked down to Interstate 684, where I put my thumb out like a rookie matador’s muleta. What followed was ten thousand miles across 1970s America — a Vietnam vet whose little brother came home in a box, a flute player who steered with his knees, a peyote vision in the redwoods, Jerry Garcia playing my guitar, the night strange lights came down and read the Pacific, five days fasting in a Texas canyon until the stones turned to doves in my hands. It reads in a day because the road moves that way. No destination. Just the next mile, the next stranger, the next thing the road hands you. (I’ve since folded it into a larger book, “Thumb Out,” where that summer becomes the middle act — but it stands on its own.)

Here’s the thing. At twenty-one I wasn’t writing a book at all. I wasn’t thinking about readers, or spirituality, or scripture. I was just keeping a journal — a little book I carried in my backpack, RECORD stamped on the cover. I still have it. Fifty years later it’s what I built the memoir from: the young man took down the days, the old man made the book.

So whatever this reader felt, neither of them put it there on purpose. It got in on its own. And the more I sat with that, the more I understood why — because I’d been pointed at this without knowing it for most of my life. At Exeter I’d studied the hero’s journey — Campbell, and the old texts that came after, all turning on the same handful of truths. That the lovely flower grows only from the wound. That a wise man always appears along the road. That you find your way only by following your own path, not the one laid out for you. I’d been an altar boy. I’d knelt in Notre Dame and Winchester Cathedral, stood before the Pietà, read Kierkegaard before I understood him. I was tuned to the beyond, and had been for a long time.

For anyone who’s never opened it: the Gita is a slice of a vast Sanskrit epic, and it takes place at the worst possible moment — on a battlefield, just before a war. A warrior named Arjuna sits frozen in his chariot, staring across the field at the cousins and teachers he’s about to fight. He doesn’t want to do it. His charioteer turns out to be the god Krishna in disguise, and the whole Gita is their conversation in that frozen instant before the arrows fly.

Krishna’s answer is the part that lodged in me decades ago and never left. You have a right to your actions, he tells Arjuna, but never to the fruits of your actions. Do the thing because it’s yours to do. Act with everything you have — and then release your grip on how it turns out. The trouble isn’t action. It’s the craving for the result, the clinging to the outcome. That craving is what binds us, spins the wheel, keeps us coming back. Act without it, and the same deed that would have chained you sets you free.

I think of my father when I read that. Because he unknowingly became the man Krishna warns against.

Dux was the sun the whole family revolved around — towering, godlike, larger than any room he stood in. It’s hard to square that with how he ended: by the time he died he’d shrunk to a kind of munchkin, frail and shriveled, the broken remainder of an enormous man. But in those years he was immense, and he loved hugely and lived grandly. The trouble was that he was attached to the fruit of everything he touched, and to nothing more than his six children. We weren’t people he’d set in motion and released. We were results he was owed — and more than that, we were stories he intended to write. He searched tirelessly, all his life, for the angle that would turn each of us into some grand success of his own authorship, driven by his ego, almost never shaped to what the kid in front of him actually wanted. He wanted me to be a monk or a priest — he burned incense, played Gregorian chant, brought Monsignor Blake to Sunday dinner. He wanted me to go to Vietnam as an officer and die a hero: you might as well go as a lieutenant rather than some buck private in the mud.

And one summer he decided I would be a pitcher. I’d shattered my right elbow at six — a bad fall, badly healed — and I think in his mind the pitching would fix it, rebuild the broken arm into something that could throw like Juan Marichal, the high leg kick, the whole motion. Evening after evening, home from the city, he’d make me throw. Pitch after pitch after pitch until the elbow screamed. He believed that if he just drilled it into my body long enough, the result would have to come — the boy repaired, the arm made right, the outcome delivered. I had a great start. Then I fell apart, and never pitched again. That was the man in miniature: the thing wanted so badly, drilled so hard, that what he was trying to fix simply broke again. He’d stumbled into a partnership with one of JFK’s groomsmen and let himself imagine an ambassadorship to France, closer to the throne his name came down from. A man of unbridled ambition, dreaming in every direction at once, every dream a result he intended to collect.

And then 1973 came, and all of it crumbled into dust at once.

I came home from the road that September and pitched my tent in the pine groves across from the house, not sure I was even welcome anymore. The estate was under contract — twenty-five acres of Westchester about to belong to strangers. The house was empty. My father had moved to the city. My old room stood with the door wide open, exactly as I’d left it two months before; nobody had bothered to close it. On my way out, months earlier, I’d crested the last hill and let one memory tug at my resolve — my father in the Mianus River Gorge, yelling for the net, a brown trout breaking the surface with the sun on its impossible speckles. Then the other image rose up behind it and canceled it out. My father, scowling. Blaming me for being clumsy with the net, blaming me for his loss.

His loss. The marriage, the children, the estate, the dynasty — all of it experienced as a thing taken from him. And when the fruit came in rotten, he had nothing underneath it to stand on, because the loving had been bound to the winning the whole way down. So he walked away. Never looking back as he chased his dreams of owning and racing thoroughbred horses.

The results he’d grasped at didn’t just fail. They inverted, in ways that would have horrified him. Here was a man fixed on bloodline and on the throne of France his name came down from — a man who pictured grandchildren on thrones, heading corporations, chairing university departments. Somehow he married the orphaned daughter of an Irish immigrant, expecting her to give him a president of the United States. What he got instead came out a generation later of mixed race, Black, Japanese, working in the trades and as nurses. The careful line he’d guarded, scattered to the wind. The only one of six children ever to earn a college degree was the dyslexic rebel he’d least have bet on — the chainsaw man, a timber faller in the Oregon woods. Even there my father couldn’t stop trying to write the story: he pushed my brother toward geology, told him there was far better money in rock than in trees. My brother was horrified. Are you kidding me? The last thing on earth he’d ever want to be. Every fruit my father clung to turned into something he could not have wanted.

And me? I was no Arjuna who’d renounced his ego. I wanted to be a film director. I wanted to be a rock star. I wanted, if anything, the same grand outcomes my father wanted for me — I’d just chosen my own list. My Nana told me reprovingly, “You are just like your father.” And then the road took the list away.

Because you can’t hitchhike with a plan. There I was, a pauper in the breakdown lane with eighty borrowed dollars — a hobo, a Woody Guthrie figure thumbing through a country I was seeing for the first time from underneath. I’d come from immense privilege and hadn’t known it until the road showed me. I moved through regions where the opportunities I’d taken for granted simply didn’t exist — had never existed — for the people who stopped to pick me up. The vet from Bridgeport who went to Vietnam because he didn’t know any better. The draft resister who did two years in Leavenworth and couldn’t get decent work after. I was learning the shape of my own luck by leaving it behind.

And mile by mile, the road did to me what Krishna asked of Arjuna and what my father could never do for himself. It pried my hands off the outcome. You do the single action that’s yours — stand there, thumb out, available — and you let go of all the rest. Whether anyone stops. Where they’re going. What comes next. You don’t choose the ride. You don’t steer. You receive what comes and you make something of it, and then you let that go too, because there’s another mile and another stranger and the day isn’t done. Do that for ten thousand miles and it stops being a technique and starts becoming a way of being in the world. The craving quiets. The wheel slows. Something in you that was clenched since boyhood begins, mile by mile, to loosen its grip — never all at once, never for good, but enough.

The ambition didn’t die out there. It rode shotgun with the surrender — it still does. But it stopped running the car. And somewhere in all that letting go, following my own path away from him, I became — without ever meaning to — the very thing my father most wanted. A kind of monk. Abstinent most of my life. Broke most of my life. Living on the edges, occasional feast and mostly fast. He grasped at sanctity with both hands and lost everything, and shrank to a munchkin doing it. I fled sanctity, empty-handed, and it found me on the side of a highway.

That’s what my reader saw before I did. Not a road book. A book about the one lesson my father spent his whole life unable to learn, and that the road beat into me before I was old enough to know I was being taught. The right to the action. Never to the fruit.

And here is the part I’m still learning. Writing this memoir was my action, mine to do, and I did it. But I cannot govern the fruit of it. The book has cost me my siblings — complete alienation. Telling the truth as I lived it carried a price I never got to set, paid in the one currency I’d have most wanted to keep. I had the right to write it. I never had a right to how it would land. Most days I feel strong — and I’ve learned to be a little afraid of feeling strong, because the pride of having let go is just one more thing to let go of. It still saddens me. The phone doesn’t ring the way it used to. But that’s the work. It always was.

My reader was reminded of the Gita. I get it now.

I write here about the long road from that summer to this kitchen table — new pieces when they come. Surfing the Interstates is the book this one came from. If any of it speaks to you, stay a while.

That reader was Alan Hamsher — the first person to ever buy and read my book, and still, somehow, the one who understood it first. This one's for you, Alan.

I write here about the long road from that summer to this kitchen table — new pieces when they come. Thumb Out is the book this one came from. If any of it speaks to you, stay a while.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

I wrote about it in Chapter 23 of my memoir, “Thumb Out” -

One afternoon I was alone in the movie room when Jerry Garcia walked in. I’d met him briefly three years earlier in San Rafael when he played my 1943 Harmony Cremona and told me to let it guide me. He bought a Super 8 projector, and we got to talking about film. He was genuinely enthusiastic — he wanted to make films, loved the medium, and we stood there in that cramped back room going back and forth about cameras and what film could do. A few days later his publicist called and arranged for me to shoot on stage with my Super 8 during a show. Standing on stage filming the Grateful Dead — that was probably the high point of my entire time in the Bay Area.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

Read it here.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback