I Was Born at Night, But Not Last Night_ As the saying goes, _no rest for the wicked_. From Friday night to Saturday morning (the "middle night"), I couldn't sleep, and I didn't sleep very well on Saturday morning, either. I did manage to watch a little of the second _Rocky_ with Jason Sudeikis and Olivia Munn, two films that seemed more toying with our fascination with the Rocky character than about Rocky himself. I had wanted to go see _Rocky_ in London in 1990, but I got a call saying that my mother was ill. She'd been going in for tests and treatments and was told there was nothing more they could do, that she would be very weak for a time. She and I talked it over, and I thought it best to wait. I hadn't seen her much in the years since my father died; we were not on good terms, and I was nervous about how she would react. I made the decision not to go, and once I had made it, I knew it was the right one. I was not in the mood to see a movie about a fighter who took too many punches. I didn't need to see myself in the story. And I was glad I hadn't gone, because my mother died that day. On Sunday afternoon, my brothers and sisters and I drove to the churchyard where she and my father were buried, an eight-minute drive from my home in the Bronx. We walked among the gravestones, and there on her gravestone, in black felt-tip, was her name, a heart, and the years of her birth and death. I didn't know whether she was cremated or buried, and I felt for a moment as if I was walking into the past rather than to the place where she lay. Then I realized that was what I was doing. It was Sunday, a day for making amends with the past, for forgiving oneself and others for the wrongs of the day before. We stood around her grave for a little while and took some photos. Later that night, I went to dinner with a friend at a Chinese restaurant in the west Seventies. By the time I got there, I was feeling good, I'd had a glass of wine, and my head was clear. But as soon as I saw my friend, I knew something was wrong. She seemed preoccupied and distant, but my mind was full of more personal business. I thought of the person who was about to tell me about her own father, whose life had also been consumed with sports. I'd known about her father's death and had thought about him often, wondering if and how I would one day meet him. We had never had an intimate conversation about the sport that had defined him and been the biggest factor in his life; rather, I had seen him through the prism of his own experiences, where sport was only the prism and never the subject. I wondered how a person defined by a particular sport could be a friend or father. Then, in the months and years since his death, I had read his obituary in the New York _Times_ and kept myself distracted with the task of finding it. My friend had never met my father, but she shared my interest in him. She was looking for the obituary as much as I was. As I drove to the restaurant, I wondered about the circumstances of his life—not the details of the life itself, but how his death had touched me. Would he think of his son differently than I did of my father, now that I am a father myself? Is there a difference in how we would understand our fathers, as they would understand us? And what about how my father had been remembered: in an obituary, which is the very definition of journalism, or in poetry, or in stories and songs about him? I was about to tell my friend something important about my father, something I felt sure would not only give my father a voice in her life, but a father I had known a little bit. We ordered dinner. "How is everyone?" she asked. I didn't answer her at first. Finally, I said, "My mother died." She looked down, as if to find the words to say something of comfort. Then she said that she was sorry and wondered if I had had a chance to see her. I replied that we hadn't been very close, and that I didn't really know how to deal with that information at this point. "We were not close when I was a kid," I said. "But now . . . I don't know how to be close to her, or to anyone. But I hope you find that." It was at that moment, as my friend looked down, that I understood something. My mother's death, all those years ago, had become a wound so big that not being close to anyone—even to me—could be a natural result. How would I even know? We went on to eat dinner. • • • For my father, athletics was a way to gain control of life's uncertainties. He had been in terrible pain much of his life, a pain he tried to hide as he fought back. Now he had only one thing left to do to make everything work. The next step was to learn to speak, and then teach his son, a future champion, how to write and how to think and how to fight. * * * When he died in my arms in a car crash on May 25, 1996, the last thing he said was "Keep fighting." • • • The road is long. Just ask the great American writer Jack London. A father, a son, and the writer's _Sea Wolf_ A month after my mother's death, I started re-reading Jack London's stories. He was the master. I was in France, but London is the master. I was in Paris. If he weren't, I would have never heard of him, because he's not well known in the US. But he is the grand-daddy of us all. Jack London was a real writer—his stories are told from a perspective no one had seen, an outlaw culture of men who were desperate to express a kind of freedom that had been denied to them and who, in turn, were denied it by everyone else in society. At a time when people were fighting for their personal liberty and civil rights, London saw them as the American Indians had seen their tribes when they were being destroyed by invaders: as people who had always been a part of the story of America. London had been born Jack Conner in San Francisco in 1876. In his short, sad life he would suffer a great deal of tragedy and then a great deal more suffering as he tried to forget the pain. In his books, London portrayed that suffering in the lives of men and boys who were born into the wrong time in American history, but who were still struggling to understand that it was time. Even the titles of some of the books show the depth of his connection with and understanding of these men: _The Call of the Wild, White Fang_ , and _The Sea Wolf_. He wrote about the stories of men on the run who were on the same road but who never met. For me, these are the great American stories, and there are so many of them. When I started this work in June 2000, this collection was my only copy of London's stories, but now I am reading my friend and collaborator Jim Harrison's _The Raw and the Cooked_. I started with London, but I will end with London. — _Tyler Kepner_ _Bend in the River, Wherever I May Find It_ When I was fifteen years old, I lived with my mother in a trailer in California, where I had been sent to be treated for my weight problem. I went to live there from my father's house, where I was sent to live with him. He and my mother divorced a year before my dad died, and my father didn't want me around. After the funeral, a woman who knew me from my school invited me to live with her in New York, where she had an apartment on East Thirty-eighth Street. My mother had moved to New York by then; I lived there with her for two years. In the first story that follows, the main character, Jack London, becomes an "outsider" in a sense. But that word doesn't always mean an outcast, even though he was forced to find an out-of-the-way place to live. He ended up living on the streets, and I often felt that I was living that way when I couldn't afford an apartment. My daughter is not the only person on the planet who has to make a living in the streets. — _Bill Barich_ _A Sailor's Yarn_ _Prologue_ In his pocket were letters that were no longer really his to keep; a few sovereigns; a letter from Johnnie Hedge—the man who put up most of his money when he was in need of it, who put up his five hundred pounds a year in case of emergencies—which was his capital, and would have paid off; the letter from the people in his native town stating that he was not to be removed from his present work because that work was necessary, for the people were suffering; and some pictures cut from newspapers. There was the