With this thought in mind, Clete and Alafair and I went to a wild celebration among thousands of revelers in downtown Santa Rosa, surrounded by hills that glowed in the sunset with a purple aura under a starry sky, Martha & the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street” blaring from the loudspeakers.
And that’s the way our Manichean tale ends, on a summer night in the land of the free and the home of the brave, trapped between vineyards and the sea and the souls of migrants who come with dust and go with the wind, all of us twirling among young people who wore flowers in their hair, a church bell clanging without stop in a Spanish mission.
Roll on forever, Woody.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my wife, Pearl, and my daughter Pamala for their encouragement and support and their suggestions with the manuscript. I would also like to express my appreciation to my publisher Jonathan Karp, my editor Ben Loehnen, my production editor Katie Rizzo, and my copyeditor E. Beth Thomas, whose diligence and commitment have been unflagging.
Thanks also to Jackie Seow and Alison Forner for the lovely jacket, and to Amar Deol and the many other people at Simon & Schuster who believed in my books and stood behind them. Last, thanks to all the gang at the Spitzer Agency: Anne-Lise, Philip and Mary, Lukas Ortiz, and Kim Lombardini. We’ve made quite a team, and a writer could not ask for more.