The previous evening I’d drawn a tent in the middle of some wind-howling woods. The stakes that secured the bottom of the tent were uprooted, and the flaps were flailing in the wind. As I put down my pencil, I said to myself, “That’s my life.” Indeed, it seemed as if the stakes that had secured my neat, safe existence—stakes that I had spent most of my life carefully nailing down—had been pulled up, and everything was tossing about. Underneath the sketch I wrote, “Midlife.”
