Though about athletes, I want to say just one more thing: you can learn too much about them, even learn to dislike them, just as you can with anybody. When you look very closely, the more everybody seems just alike—unsurprising and factual. And for that reason I sometimes tell less than I know, and for my money the boys in my racket make a mistake with in-depth interviews.

I’d just as soon pull a good heartstring. Write about the skinny Negro kid from Bradenton, Florida, who can’t read, suffered rickets and had scrapes with the law, yet who later accepts a basketball scholarship to a major mid western university, becomes a star, learns to read and eventually majors in psychology, marries a white girl and later starts a consulting firm in Akron. That is a good story. Maybe the white girl would be of eastern European extraction. Her parents would oppose, but get won over.

If all this makes it seem that being a sportswriter is at best a superficial business, that’s because it is. And it is not for that reason a bad profession at all. Nor am I, I will admit, altogether imperfectly suited for it.

At Terminal A we become two veteran travelers. I stand in line at United while Vicki goes to powder her nose and buy flight insurance. As it turns out, she is as much a denizen of airports as I am. When everything turned bad with old dagger-head Everett, she informed me on the escalator, she used to drive out to the new airport in Dallas, watch planes leave, and pretend she was on all of them. “If you stayed in that airport for one year,” she said, beaming like a carhop as we headed up the glittering ticket concourse full of passengers and loved ones looking for partners, “you’d see everybody in the world. And you’d sure see Charley Pride a hundred times at least.”

Vicki also believes flight insurance to be the world’s best bargain, and who am I to say no, though I advise her not to make me her beneficiary.

“Well, I guess not” she says, with a vaguely disgusted look. “I always make the R.C. Church my heir in everything.”

“That’s fine then,” I say, though she and I have never discussed religion.

“I just went to Catholics when I married Everett, in case you’re wondering,” she says, and looks at me oddly. “They do a lot for the hospitals. And the Pope’s a good old guy I think. I wadn’t but a dirty Methodist before, like everybody else in Texas except the Baptists.”

“That’s great,” I say and give her arm a squeeze.

“Freedom to choose,” she says, then skitters away toward the insurance machines.

By wide degrees now I am better. Public places always work this curative on me, and if anything I suffer the opposite of agoraphobia. I enjoy the freely shared air of the public. It is, in a way, my element. Even the yellow-aired Greyhound terminals and murky subway stations make me feel a well-being, that a place has been provided for me and my fellow man together. When I was married to X, I hated the grinding summer weeks we’d spend first at the Huron Mountain Club, and, later, at Sumac Hills down in Birmingham, where her father was a founding member. I hated that still air of privilege and the hushed, nervous noises of mid western exclusivity. I thought it was bad for the children and kept stealing off with Ralph to the Detroit Zoo and the Belle Isle Botanical Garden, and once all the way out to the Arboretum in Ann Arbor. X’s had been an entire life of privilege—clubs and reserved tables and private boxes at the ball game—though I think all that means nothing if you have a sound enough character to weather it, which she has.

Across from me studying the departures board I spy a face I recognize but hope to get away without acknowledging. It is the long face of Fincher Barksdale. Fincher is holding his white United ticket folder and has a big TWA golf bag over his shoulder.