2. Got in the car and drove to my alma mater, Wesleyan University, in Middletown, CT, where I had breakfast at O’Rourkes Diner.  Owner Brian O’Rourke comes right up to me and says,  ”I remember you. Class of 1980?” I said yup.  He asked after my friends, as if it had been last week, instead of years and years ago, when last I had pie and coffee in the middle of the night at his diner.  I had eggs over easy, bacon, home fries, Irish soda bread, and truly fine coffee.

3. Then walked in a wide circle around the campus.  Down the old brownstone buildings of college row, over to my freshman dorm, back through the Science Center, where I paused for just a moment in the big lecture hall, where Psych 101 was in progress.  I stood at the back and remembered being a student in that room, remembered hearing people such as my own innocent, young self discussed during the class on “Abnormal Psychology.”

4.  Walked into a cafe and got a latte, where the woman behind the counter also claimed to remember me from 1979.  She said the school was richer now, but it had lost its “esprit d’corps.”

5. Walked up Foss Hill and sat down just by the observatory and watched the brown leaves of autumn swirl around me. And thought:  A)  Oh how happy I was here and young;  B) Oh how sad i was here, and young; C) Oh how I wish I were 20 again; D) Oh thank god I am not twenty again;  E) How lucky I was, to go here, then, when I did, and to know the people I did; and F) How lucky I am now, to be where I am now instead, here, in this life, at this moment.

6.  Walked through the Arts Center, into the old music building, downstairs to the practice rooms, where a dozen different people played a dozen different pianos. I pulled into one of them and played an F chord, and then a B flat.  Noodled.  And remembered noodles of long ago, same piano, same room.

7.  Got back in the car, got outta there, drove up to the big cemetery and looked all around at the blustery autumn, and remembered how beloved that graveyard was by dear, departed John Moynihan, my friend who used to appear out of nowhere, wearing a pirate costume, hand you a treasure map, and just as quickly disappear.

8. And then headed north, to Maine, and my family, and the days to come.

The weather in Maine for the last two weeks has been a little schizophrenic, gorgeous autumn sunshine alternating with grey, cold days that prefigure the darkness ahead.   Still, there are times when that’s just the way we like it—too much beautiful weather tends to make people a little full of themselves, a little too blissful, and the next thing you know you have a whole state full of people acting like Californians.

Speaking of schizophrenia, I guess it’s fair to say we’re all a little worried about Mrs. Vespucci, who lives down on Maine Street by what’s left of the Venetian pulp mill. Until about twenty years ago– I think it was about the time of the Clarence Thomas hearings on TV– Mrs. V. was known for her florid complexion, a color you might call purple.

It was 1991 or 2, though, when the second head appeared.  It looked just like her other one, except for the fact that it was blue.  Her original head,  for its part, turned bright red.

To be honest we were all kind of freaked out the first couple of times we laid eyes on it, but then after a while we realized that we’d seen worse things over the course of our long lives, and this was just one more.

The thing is, though, it’s not the fact that Mrs. Vespucci has two heads, one red, one blue, that worries her friends.  It’s the fact that the heads don’t get along, and in fact, for the last year or so, they won’t even speak to each other.

For a while—this was back when Ross Perot was running, a third head—a tiny green one– started sprouting, and from time to time you could hear its annoying little voice saying things like, “Here’s the deal, see,” but then the green head fell off and we haven’t seen it again, except for four years ago, briefly, when Ralph Nader came through town.

The blue head, if you ask it, says that there wouldn’t even be a red head, if not for that occasional green one, but to me this is just the kind of doom and gloom we’ve come to expect from the blue head.  The red head, on the other hand,  says that the blue head is a socialist, and that if the blue head got its way,  the red head would be hauled in front of a “death squad” and forced to speak French.  Sometimes the red head head claims the blue one wasn’t even born here.

In our town we tend to respect people’s privacy, but quite honestly, we all liked it better when the two heads talked to each other, when they treated each other with respect.  I didn’t even mind it when the heads fought with each other, going at it tooth and nail.  But now that they’re giving each other the silent treatment, or worse, one head shouting “you lie!”  when the other one is talking—it’s depressing.  I liked it better when Mrs. Vespucci had talking heads.

I liked it better still when she just had one head, back when the woman got along with herself.  Maybe I’m old fashioned.  But if you ask me, two heads are worse than one.

The trail was hard, though, and not only because I’m no longer a young thing.  Ten hours for me round trip, and most of that alone. Late in the day i got the willies, hiking alone through the slowly-deepening twilight.  Raised my spirits by singing (also in order to scare off any black bears thinking the coast was clear.)  So if anybody heard a voice in the woods singing, “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” or “The Lakes of Pontchatrain,” or “Arthur McBride and the Recruiting Sergeant,” or “Uncle John’s Band,”… well, now you know. That was me, walking all the way from bright Maine summer and into autumn.

Thought a little bit about Stephen King’s commentary on “how to write a novel”– i.e., “one word at a time,” the response that often draws a laugh, but which is, essentially, how you do it–or anything, really.   I’ve thought about that advice a lot this summer as I’ve mined deeper and deeper into the now 700+ pages of Falcon Quinn II.  It’s also how you climb a mountain: one step at a time.  One foot after the other.

Got home at 8 PM and drank a beer and had hot chipotle mac n cheese with the family. And told them all about my day in the sky.

A few lovely surprises on the trail:

• met up with a family– mom, dad, two kids, and grampa– doing the circuit with a three month old labrador retriever puppy.  They lapped me a couple times, and I thought, as I nursed my middle-aged knees:  Okay.Fine.  I’m slower than a puppy.

• met up with a couple, about 60, painting blazes. Trail names: Old Moose and One Step.  I introduced myself by my trail name: Spider.

• on the A.T. a bunch of through-hikers came through at lightening speed– four hearty young men, about 23.  One wearing a kilt.  They passed me like a vast diesel Mac passing a kid on a tricycle.  Met up with them at the summit– they’d started in Georgia on April 4. One of them used the name “Tweak.”  I asked, What was the best day on the trail?  Without a pause, the four of them said, in unison,  “Today.”

“Romance is a dangerous distraction,” editor Michael Taeckens writes in the introduction to Love Is a Four-Letter Word: True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts (Plume paperback original, 297 pp., $16). He spoke with USA TODAY’s about some of the book’s true stories and why they resonate.
‘Homecoming, With Turtle’
by Junot Diaz (The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

“I love Junot’s piece as much for the eloquent description of returning to his hometown of Santo Domingo after a 20-year absence as for the details of the nightmarish experience it was for him and his girlfriend.”

‘Trans’
by Jennifer Finney Boylan (She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders)

“Jennifer takes a unique experience — dating while one’s gender is in flux — and turns it into a hilarious and poignant story that is completely universal.”

‘Head Lice and My Worst Boyfriend’
by Lynda Barry, cartoonist, creator of the syndicated strip Ernie Pook.
“Lynda, my idol, is able to make life seem simultaneously poetic and comic — here she takes the humiliation of getting head lice and giving it to her boyfriend — and realizes ‘head lice are much easier to get rid of than bad love.’ ”

• At the Met, had a conversation with the portrait of the woman looking out at us with a sad, lovely expression, pens in hand; over her shoulder a distant couple is visible through a broken window pane. I told her, Cheer up.  You’re going to be fine, and anyway you’re an artist. (The painting is Marie-Denise Villers’ Young Woman Drawing.)

• at Thursday nite reading, a stranger came up to me with tears in her eyes. We shook hands.

• Thursday afternoon, lunch with Newsweek executive editor Ted Moncreiff. Talked about writing and magazines and FALCON QUINN. Afterward, walked past the STONEWALL inn. And whispered, Thanks.

• on the way to Penn station to catch the train home to Maine, the subway stationmaster looked at me and said, “Were you on that Oprah show?” I said, “Yeah, but that was a long time ago.” Said she: “You look the same!” I smiled and said, “So do you!”  And headed down the stairs, toward home.

When I was twenty I climbed onto the roof of an abandoned building with two friends on an October day and a few moments later we were surrounded by thousands of starlings, all migrating to the South.  We had not expected to find birds in flight when we climbed on to that roof—I don’t know what we expected to find—but having reached this stunning spectacle, the three of us lay on our backs and watched the sky undulate with motion and life.

I would not have used this word then but now I would describe the state we found ourselves in as a state of grace.

Grace is an elusive concept, but we all know what it is.  It’s a sense of things fitting, of being, as T.S. Eliot wrote, at the “still point of the turning world.”

A young writer named Michael Byers has a story entitled “The Beautiful Days” in which he describes a young man, not so much older than I was when I climbed on that roof with my friends, who finds that “when he least expected it , he would be visited with a new gust of this unnamable generosity of spirit, when the world seemed nearly platonic in its perfection…  The sensation that he was one among many—and yet still one, an individual being set loose on the planet—and that so much beauty abounded, on all sides, in every form, for him to encounter—all this combined to lift his heart above the ordinary, and made him, when it came, inexpressibly joyful.”

I have felt this sense of grace now and again in my life. I think looking for this sensation is one of the things that keeps me going.  I felt it when I heard the newborn cry of my children.  I felt it when I saw Deedie coming down the aisle of the church in her mother’s wedding dress. I felt it in a pub named An Spailpeen Fanach in Cork, Ireland one night when I heard a young woman singing a song of famine and emigration in Gaelic, and everyone in the place softly sang the words along with her.  I felt it one night when Deedie made Chinese shrimp with black pepper that was so spicy tears rolled out of my eyes.

For most people, the forms of grace in life do not collide, or live in conflict with each other.

For trans people–and various other “outcasts”, for lack of a better word–there is a lifelong lament that  the things that make us feel at peace in the world are the very things that make the world feel at odds with us.

How we make sense of this ridiculous and heartbreaking predicament tells the story of our lives, or part of it anyway.  We feel rage at a universe which seems to reveal–every once in a while—that elusive sense of grace, and yet makes that glimpse so elusive and so difficult to achieve that we wonder if we’d been better off not even knowing about it. .

I’ve never met an “outcast” who wasn’t spiritual, in some way.   For me, the face of God has always appeared in the faces of other people—in Deedie’s face while she’s sleeping, in the faces of my children as they read a book, in the face of my mother as she looks at the orchids she once raised with my father, now gone these last twenty-plus years.

On New Year’s Eve, 2000, I stood by the banks of Great Pond, in Maine. Some friends were having a New Year’s Eve party to celebrate the millenium, and our local fire company was setting off fireworks.  (Since this is a small town, the fireworks went off at 9 PM so the firemen could still get home to their families in time for midnight.)

The fireworks display was laughable and small.  Most of the adults who had gathered by the frozen lake to watch them went inside after a moment or two, totally unimpressed.

My son Zach, however, five years old, stood by the edge of the ice, amazed.  I went and held his hand, and for that moment I saw the fireworks as he did—not as some small town event, laughable in its cheesiness, but as the most miraculous even in the universe.  I picked him up and I held him up in the freezing winter air.  We watched the fireworks above the lake turn the night sky green and blue and orange.

Then he turned to me and smiled.  Zach’s breath gathered in steam clouds.  His face radiated light, just as his mother’s had on the day we were married, just as the sun would the next morning, as it rose on a new century.

“I want it to go on forever,” he said.