He found himself still with too many questions and not enough answers.

Home is watching the moon rise over the open, sleeping land and having someone you can call to the window, so you can look together. Home is where you dance with others, and dancing is life.

A person can't change all at once.

I know I can do it," Todd Downey said, helping himself to another ear of corn from the steaming bowl. "I'm sure that in time her death will be a mystery, even to me.

Waiting rooms were made for books-of course! But so are theater lobbies before the show, long and boring checkout lines, and everyone's favorite, the john.

As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light. As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to write. As always the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a brick wall. As always, the marvelous joyful nervy feeling of journey begun.

But writers INVITE ghosts, maybe; along with actors and artists, they are the only totally accepted mediums of our society. They make worlds that never were, populate them with people who never existed, and then invite us to join them in their fantasies. And we do it, don't we? Yes. We PAY to do it.