I arrived in Toronto on a Friday evening in late March. I believe it was cold but whether it was unseasonably cold or not I could not tell you. This is what I can tell you: That from the moment we touched down in the early dark a small clock began ticking deep within my core, a clock that for me would stop in less than 48 hours. That, had you been there with me, had you been my traveling companion, if you looked very carefully — with the most precise optics — you might have discovered a very fine thread, a fiber fine as spider silk, trailing back from the plane, across the western sky to southern California, and back East to western Massachusetts, and northwest to Ann Arbor, and then to Toronto, and back to Ann Arbor, and back to Boston, and back to a white Dutch Colonial house on a quiet shady street in a small college town, where, on the second floor, you would find me, holding my phone like a lost thought.  Continue reading →