When he was 19, Richard Slavin, a nice Jewish boy from the suburbs of Chicago, went backpacking in Europe for two months.
“Hey,” I told him. “I have a son about to do the same thing.”
“But,” Slavin added with a twinkle, “I never came back!”
With that he gave a hearty laugh as jolly a sound as the ice cream man’s bell. Pure joy. He could laugh now he was laughing now, in a conference room in Midtown, in town for a book tour because at 60-something and bald, he is no longer the wandering hippie