Chapter One:

Divine SplendidIsolation

George was a reflective man, a thinking man.

George understood that winter is survived by the vain, the honest, the militant, the self-deceiving, the naïve, or the fragile and sincere. God was good to a range of peoples.

For George, life was all a magical battle between thought and event, truth and lies.

Yet winter remains hard on all types of humans, he observed, as evident each year in this neighborhood. Their survival was as much about luck and persistence as it was about likely selection or preservation of the saints. You may have strong first principles on how you run your family, enjoy your friends. You may believe in what matters.

Yet winter will test those principles like a tyrant.

The First Three Weeks of January

George would ready himself for winter with a pile of books near. Walt Whitman’s self-absorbed charm; Emerson’s smart rankings on freedom and fate; contemporary books since the 2030s, but only if they had something foundational to say about the human soul. He adopted, in winter, his mother’s habit of cracking sunflower seeds to appease some of the anxiety found in his face and jaw.

Because George was raised poor, there was a quiet desperation in him. His Puerto Rican foster brothers taught him the better worddesperado. It rhymed with tornado, so he felt it a more incisive word. To Georgedesperation sounds too Ivy League, too much like the nose-in-the-air folks.Desperado—that is the word to describe George to date.

No matter how rich he became, not matter how secure, how much loved, he woke with the fears of Job, certain some new acquaintance was close to the devil. This unsteadiness came with his sense of the virtues and the vices. His wife, of Sicilian descent, could imagine a crown of thorns above his spine—and she would massage at night his weary neck, saying: “It must be hard, George, keeping up such a big head all day long.” They would laugh together, ready to cuddle.

“You have a stupid mouth sometimes,” Varlissima warned. He would think about that for a decade, and write a book about it. She encouraged him to do more and say less. Even though he tried to remain stoic, and silent, and listen to what others had to say, he had an irrepressible native exuberance in his bones. He was a reflective man, and less and less a stoic man.

Polish peasant-made people are sometimes like this. Feeling like he had ascended into a world far higher than ever imagined, it was hard for George to assume that mask of silence for long. By afternoon, after writing at his desk, he was the big mouth again. “Big shot, big shit,” his grandmother warned many decades before.

Much went flying by in George’s mind each morning, stimulated by fine coffee and captivity. Most of the scenes of his youth were so brutal they were over in thirty seconds; but the new George, the older George, could afford to ruminate.

Winter in Saratoga is relentless: icy, stern, long. The first three weeks of January stood still, completely frozen. Ice on all the love