The Sleeping Porch
I heard them say that it wasn’t good
for boys and girls to share a bedroom.
About a year after a baby sister came
the upper sleeping porch was added.
A space of my own to imagine a world
where I was ruler of my kingdom,
collector of every odd thing that caught my eye,
overlooking the street, trains beyond the fields.
The sleeping porch, unheated in winter,
cool in summer, with windows on three sides
opening wide to let in the breeze, except
when sudden storms brought torrents of rain.
It was my reading room on long summer days,
tales of King Arthur, The Martian Chronicles
and every Jack London in the town library,
a smuggled copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
One whole summer I threw myself
into The World of Mathematics—four volumes,
thousands of pages, with new heroes:
Archimedes, Kepler, Newton, Einstein.
I returned there today to the dust and mustiness—
cardboard boxes of moldy magazines and books,
yellow paint peeling from the balustrades.
The room had grown smaller. My world had not.
Prologue to The Night of the Shooting Stars
To knock at the door of the past was in a word to see it open to me quite wide—
to see the world within begin to ‘compose’ with a grace of its own round
the primary figure, see it people itself vividly and insistently.
A Small Boy and Others
—Henry James
In the months after my wife Rhenda died in 2024, I began clearing out the house to stay busy. My daughter set aside the clothing she wanted to keep, and I gave the rest to charity or threw it away. Some boxes had not been opened since we moved from our old house forty-two years earlier.
In the basement, beneath the stairs, I pulled out an old cardboard box. It had not been opened in sixty years. Inside were several dozen letters from my college girlfriend, Robin Fondé, written in elegant cursive, in ink, on cotton rag stationery. Her voice, clear and unchanged, rose from the pages.
I carried the box upstairs, poured a Scotch and water, and sat with the stack. I read the letters in order. There was the long hot summer of 1959, alive with youthful passion that culminated in an impromptu night on the beach. I gave her my fraternity pin that fall, which she wore with pride. Then there was the ugly fight on the overnight train to Nashville for a football game because of my failure to tell her what I was thinking or was feeling. Reconciliation came slowly, and with it the first real understanding that love asks for equality, not possession.
As I read the letters, those years revealed how deeply they had shaped me. The lessons I carried, often imperfectly, into the rest of my life became the foundation of my marriage to Rhenda and the way I approached my work and life.
Opening that box felt like knocking at the door of the past. Stories from those years sprang into my mind. The memories engaged and captivated me. Scenes returned with a clarity I had not expected, and with them came a long-buried desire: to write them down.
I began where I had always failed before—Vietnam. I had tried many times but could never find the heart to write about destruction and death. I could list the events, but bringing the stories to life always eluded me. This time, the memories came alive and found their own shape and voice.
From there, other moments followed naturally: childhood wonder, youthful mischief, risks, work, love, and loss. Over the past year, these pieces accumulated into the memoirs that make up this book.
The opening chapter recounts one of my earliest memories: watching a meteor shower as a six-year-old boy. That night did not tell me what would happen in my life. It only taught me to look up. What followed—what I built, what I broke, what I tried to save—unfolds in the pages after that.
So pull up a chair. Pour yourself a stiff drink. Start at the beginning—or wherever your interest leads you.