The Mississippi Gulf Coast, the luminous world of the 1960’s, was there waiting for me. I came a long way to find it. I knew the scent of orange groves, moving trains, the sultry air of the New Orleans French Quarter and morning mist on long green fairways. And, I was very familiar with generous doors to new beginnings that appeared often and unexpectedly in some remarkable places. The light of the young, incandescent Mississippi days was like that, glittering on a crescent sliver of white sand filled with night fires, adolescent dreams and incomparable friends. It took charge of my life from the very first, revealing an invisible world that defined who I was and who I would be. But long before that, my small, fragmented history unfolded in other inconspicuous places that were worlds away from Mississippi. It was the colorless road of a portable past and a shifting, unknowable future. Then something extraordinary happened, something I could have never anticipated. And, it was as if a beneficent jailor had swung a cell door wide open to a world of crisp air, startling and blue.