And underneath the missing, growing quietly, was the thing that would carry me down a center aisle two decades later: a pride so large I did not yet have anywhere to put it.

Chapter 12 — Graduation Day

Four years later I stood in the audience of a college auditorium holding a cheap camera I’d bought for the occasion, and I was, I am not ashamed to say, already a mess before anything had happened.

I had gray in my beard now — a lot of it.

My knee had gone bad somewhere in my forties and it complained about the stadium seating.

I was forty-nine years old, and the twenty-seven-year-old who had stood in a doorway with three hundred and twelve dollars and no idea what he was doing felt like a different man entirely, a man I was fond of and a little sorry for and very glad had stayed.