Have you ever seen a ski jumper getting ready to defy rationality - the individual large hill, the K-point more than 100 meters, those people who fly? I raced cross country in high school (John Dolan was our strongest racer, I've never found where he went?) and we traveled in the same yellow school bus with the jumpers. I'd grown up skiing downhill with them, and I didn't care about how steep a slope was but I wanted my skis ON THE GROUND. Those guys were different. They strapped on very wide skis, heavy things with two grooves down the middle. They climbed to the top of the jump with the skis on their shoulders, strapped their boots into the bindings inside the jump shack, sat down on a bench and shimmied themselves out into "NOTHING" onto the top of the chute. Stopping when their skis got into the track.

And then they stood. That was it. A long, sliding, heart ripping point of no return. For them maybe it wasn't heart ripping. They'd be focused on the lip, below, how to hurl themselves into the abyss. Maybe not an abyss. To hurl themselves into flight. Flying up from the earth.

I've not blogged for too long.

Tomorrow night, Thursday August 13 @ 6:30 PM I have my first reading of What Else But Home at the Tenement Museum @ 108 Orchard, just below Delancey. Hon Margarita Lopez is introducing me. Clive Priddle, my editor, is honoring me by sitting near and helping lead & guide our conversation. Please come.

I'm starting four months of traveling across America, talking with people about What Else But Home, about poverty, education, fathering, fatherlessness, adoption, fostering, mentoring. About making sure there's enough flour to study (that's a Jewish allusion).