Something just occurred to me while I was sitting here writing today. I could get in my car right now and drive to the Smokies. Today. This afternoon. There is nothing and no one stopping me from doing exactly that. And my reaction—the one I was not expecting—was: yeah, so? As in: obviously. Of course I could.
There’s a guy sitting in a borrowed basement in Cincinnati. He’s 57. He’s a heart transplant recipient—eighteen months out, managing a complex medication regimen, immunosuppressed for life. He spent thirty-five years in houses. He had a career, a marriage, a life that looked, from the outside, like the standard American version of having made it.
