An open door is only the beginning

Portugal’s population is growing. Portugal’s population is also disappearing.

Both statements are true, and somewhere between them lies the contradiction at the center of the country’s changing immigration policy. At the end of 2025, Portugal’s resident population reached an estimated 11,424,031 people, the highest number recorded by the country’s statistics agency. That represented an increase of 36,809 people during the year. The population grew even though more people died than were born, as it has for several years, because immigration continued to make up the difference. Without the people arriving from elsewhere, Portugal would already be shrinking. (Instituto Nacional de Estatística)

The longer-range figures tell a more sobering story. Under Eurostat’s baseline projection, Portugal’s population will be approximately 0.8 percent smaller in 2050 than it was in 2025. By 2100, it is projected to have fallen by more than 19 percent. The median age, already 47.3 years in 2025, is projected to reach 53.3 by the end of the century, placing Portugal among the oldest countries in Europe. More than 80 percent of Portuguese regions are expected to lose population by 2050, even as Lisbon and a handful of other urban and coastal areas continue to grow. (Eurostat population projections; Eurostat regional projections)

These are projections rather than prophecies, and Eurostat is careful to describe them as “what-if” scenarios based on assumptions about births, deaths and migration. Still, the direction is difficult to ignore. Portugal is growing today because immigrants are arriving, while the population underneath that growth continues to age and contract.

I am one of those immigrants, although I arrived through the kind of immigration system governments tend to find reassuring. Heather and I applied for D7 visas before leaving the United States. We demonstrated that we had sufficient income, secured housing, submitted the required documents and waited for permission to enter. We came to São Miguel intending to live here permanently. Since arriving, we have tried to enter the life around us rather than construct a small American annex within it. We are learning Portuguese, participating in local organizations and building artistic collaborations on the island. Our work here has been modest, although it has been sincere.

I have written before about why I call myself an immigrant rather than an expat. For me, the distinction has less to do with income or nationality than with intention. An expat can remain suspended above a place, enjoying its comforts while preserving the assumption that another life is waiting elsewhere. An immigrant has crossed into a different relationship with the country. The bureaucratic process matters, although belonging eventually asks for something beyond documents. It asks whether you are prepared to be changed by the place where you have chosen to live.

Yet there is an uncomfortable fact beneath my own argument. At sixty-eight, I am not the demographic answer to Portugal’s aging population. Heather and I bring income into the country. We pay rent, purchase goods and services, use local businesses and contribute to the cultural life around us. We have private health insurance and arrived with the means to support ourselves. Those contributions have value, although they do not make us younger. We belong to the same broad age group that is becoming an increasingly large share of Portugal’s population.

The immigrants who may offer the most direct answer to the country’s demographic problem often arrive under far less comfortable circumstances. They are younger. They work in construction, agriculture, hospitality, transportation, health care and elder care. They may have children or hope to bring their families once they have established themselves. They occupy the jobs that become visible mainly when no one is available to perform them. They are also the immigrants who increasingly encounter a narrowing door.

Portugal’s previous immigration system needed repair. That should be said plainly. The old manifestação de interesse process allowed many non-European citizens who had entered legally, often as tourists, to obtain residence after finding work and contributing to Social Security. It created a path toward legality, while also producing an enormous administrative limbo. Hundreds of thousands of applications accumulated. People worked and paid taxes for years without receiving decisions on their residency. Their uncertainty made them vulnerable to exploitative employers, overcrowded housing and intermediaries willing to profit from desperation.

AIMA, the agency created to replace SEF’s administrative immigration functions, inherited a backlog that at one point approached 400,000 cases. An immigration system cannot be considered humane simply because entry is easy when the people who enter are left without documents, appointments or any dependable timetable for their lives.

Portugal therefore had legitimate reasons to change the system. The government ended the manifestação de interesse route in 2024 and moved toward requiring most prospective workers to obtain the correct visa before arriving. The revised Foreigners’ Law, which took effect in October 2025, tightened the job-seeker visa, changed the treatment of citizens from Portuguese-speaking countries and imposed new restrictions on family reunification.

Under the revised rules, many legal residents must generally wait two years before applying to bring a spouse to Portugal. That period may be reduced to one year for couples who had lived together for at least a year before the sponsoring resident arrived. Minor children and dependents with disabilities are exempt from the waiting period, as are certain categories of highly qualified workers and investors. Applicants must also demonstrate adequate housing and sufficient financial resources. (European Commission overview; Portuguese Foreigners’ Law, Lei n.º 61/2025)

Each requirement can be defended separately. Taken together, however, they reveal a country trying to restrict immigration at the same moment its economy and population are becoming increasingly dependent upon it. The contradiction is clearest in housing.

Portugal has a severe housing shortage. Rents have risen beyond the reach of many Portuguese workers, particularly in Lisbon, Porto and parts of the Algarve. Immigrants add demand to that constrained market, just as every new resident does. It would be dishonest to pretend that rapid population growth places no pressure on housing, medical services, schools or public transportation.

Yet Portugal also needs immigrant labor to construct the housing it lacks. By 2025, immigrants accounted for approximately 30 percent of the country’s construction workforce. The industry estimates that it requires at least 80,000 additional workers simply to keep existing projects on schedule, with some estimates placing the eventual shortage as high as 120,000. Portugal plans to build 150,000 affordable homes by 2030 under a €9 billion program, while the workers required to build them are becoming more difficult to recruit.

The government created a faster visa channel for construction and other labor-shortage sectors, although participating employers must generally provide employment contracts and suitable accommodation before workers arrive. Only around 5,000 construction visas had been issued through the program by the summer of 2026. The practical absurdity is difficult to miss: Portugal needs immigrants to build homes, while employers are required to find homes for those immigrants before they can enter the country. (Reuters, “Portugal’s migrant curbs hit construction firms working to solve housing crisis”)

The same mismatch appears in the redesigned job-seeker visa, which increasingly favors highly qualified applicants. Portugal certainly needs engineers, doctors, scientists and technology workers. It also needs bricklayers, nursing assistants, agricultural workers, carers, mechanics, kitchen staff, drivers and hotel employees.

An immigration policy designed around the economy Portugal wishes to have may exclude the workers required by the economy Portugal actually has. The OECD has warned that labor shortages and population aging are already constraining Portuguese economic growth. Unemployment has remained comparatively low, younger Portuguese workers continue to leave for better wages elsewhere in Europe, and the retirement of older workers is accelerating. Recent immigration has softened those pressures without eliminating them. (OECD Economic Survey: Portugal 2026)

The effect of the restrictions is beginning to appear. According to figures cited by Reuters from a Bank of Portugal study, net immigration fell to approximately 6,200 people a month during 2025, about half the previous rate. That may be celebrated by those who see the number of immigrants as the problem. It looks different when placed beside the demand for workers, the excess of deaths over births and the projected disappearance of nearly one-fifth of Portugal’s population by 2100.

Family reunification exposes another weakness in the new approach. If Portugal wants temporary labor, delaying the arrival of spouses may appear useful. If Portugal wants people to settle, learn the language, raise children and become invested in the country’s future, separating families works against nearly every one of those goals.

A worker whose spouse and children remain elsewhere is more likely to experience Portugal as a temporary place of employment. The worker may send most earnings abroad, postpone investing in a home and eventually leave for another European country offering higher wages or a more secure family life. The presence of family creates pressures on housing and schools, while also creating the conditions from which lasting communities are made. Belonging requires more than an employment contract.

This is especially apparent from the Azores. National immigration policy is inevitably shaped by the pressures of Lisbon, where housing, tourism and migration converge most visibly. São Miguel has its own housing problems, and the effects of rapid change should not be dismissed. The islands also need working-age residents. They need people in agriculture, construction, hospitality, health care, transportation and elder care. An immigration policy created in response to congestion in the capital may produce very different consequences in places where the enduring problem is depopulation.

Portugal might benefit from a regional approach that connects legal immigration with actual local needs. Faster processing, earlier family reunification and meaningful settlement assistance could be offered to immigrants who live and work in the islands or in interior regions losing population. Such a system would require enforcement, since people cannot simply be ordered to remain in places where wages, housing and services make life impossible. It would also recognize that Portugal’s demographic problem is unevenly distributed and will not be solved by a single national restriction.

The present political argument too often forces a choice between an immigration system without control and a country with increasingly closed doors. Neither offers much of a future. Portugal needs secure borders, timely decisions and a clear legal route established before people arrive. It also needs enforceable labor protections, serious penalties for employers who exploit undocumented workers and enough administrative capacity to prevent applicants from spending years trapped inside AIMA. These are questions of competence rather than hostility.

At the same time, the country needs immigrants. It needs their work, their Social Security contributions, their children, their languages and, eventually, their sense of ownership in the society they are helping to sustain.

That does not mean every immigrant will remain, integrate or contribute equally, any more than every native-born Portuguese person does. Immigration cannot by itself repair low wages, insufficient housing, weak public services or decades of uneven development. It can buy Portugal something those other reforms cannot manufacture quickly: time.

Watching this from Portugal, I cannot avoid recognizing the same destructive impulse in the country I left. The scale, history and language of immigration in the United States are different, although the governing instinct has become familiar: describe immigrants primarily as a danger, make their lives precarious enough that they leave, and assume the economy will somehow continue without them. The Trump administration’s expansion of detention and deportation, its narrowing of legal protections and the atmosphere of fear surrounding even established immigrant families are being pursued in a country that is also aging and increasingly dependent upon immigrant labor. The Federal Reserve reported in July 2026 that the sharp reduction in immigration, combined with declining workforce participation among an aging population, had already slowed the growth of the American labor supply. Another Federal Reserve analysis described near-zero labor-force growth as unprecedented in recent American history. (Federal Reserve Monetary Policy Report, July 2026; Federal Reserve analysis of labor-force growth) From this distance, the contradiction appears especially stark. The United States and Portugal are very different countries, yet both are discovering that it is politically easier to blame immigrants for the strain within a society than to admit how thoroughly that society has come to depend upon them.

The deeper question is what Portugal wants immigrants to become. If they are merely workers, they can be admitted according to immediate shortages, housed temporarily and encouraged to leave when the work is finished. If they are prospective members of Portuguese society, the country must allow them to bring their families, build stable lives and imagine that their children will belong here without qualification.

I arrived through the front door Portugal provided for people like me. I had the resources, documents and time required to stand there and wait for it to open. Many of the people Portugal needs most urgently are standing at a different door, carrying employment contracts, tools, professional skills and the hope of bringing their families once they are settled. Portugal was right to repair the entrance. It should be careful that, in doing so, it does not lock out its own future. A country cannot ask immigrants to belong while continually reminding them that the door may close.

Sources and Further Reading

1. Instituto Nacional de Estatística (INE). “Estimativas de População Residente — 2025.” 22 June 2026.
   Portugal’s population reached 11,424,031 at the end of 2025, increasing by 36,809 during the year.
   Read the INE release

2. Eurostat. “Population Projections in the EU — EUROPOP2025.” April 2026.
   Provides Portugal’s projected population change through 2100, median-age projections and comparisons with other European countries.
   Read the Eurostat report

3. Eurostat. “Population Projections at Regional Level.” 2026.
   Examines expected population decline and aging across Portuguese and other European regions through 2050.
   Read the regional analysis

4. Eurostat. “Population and Population Change Statistics.” 2026.
   Shows that Portugal’s recent population growth resulted from positive net migration overcoming negative natural change—more deaths than births.
   Read the population-change analysis

5. Diário da República. Lei n.º 61/2025, de 22 de outubro.
   Official text of the revised Portuguese Foreigners’ Law, including changes involving family reunification, residence and immigration procedures.
   Read the legislation

6. European Commission, European Website on Integration. “Key Integration Developments and Research in Portugal.” 26 January 2026.
   A useful English-language explanation of the revised Foreigners’ Law, including the general two-year family-reunification waiting period and its exceptions.
   Read the European Commission summary

7. AIMA — Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum. “Family Reunification with a Family Member Outside Portugal.”
   Current eligibility and application information for legal residents seeking to bring family members to Portugal.
   Read the AIMA guidance

8. OECD. OECD Economic Surveys: Portugal 2026. 6 January 2026.
   Analyzes how population aging, labor shortages, weak productivity and housing costs constrain Portugal’s economy.
   Read the OECD survey

9. OECD. “Strengthening Labour-Market Resilience in the Face of Skill Shortages and Ageing.” 2026.
   Provides more detailed analysis of Portugal’s shrinking workforce, skills shortages and dependence on foreign workers.
   Read the OECD chapter

10. Reuters. “Portugal’s Migrant Curbs Hit Construction Firms Working to Solve Housing Crisis.” 20 July 2026.
    Reports that immigrants represented approximately 30% of the construction workforce; the industry required another 80,000–120,000 workers; approximately 5,000 accelerated construction visas had been issued; and net immigration had fallen to around 6,200 people per month.
    Read the Reuters investigation

11. Reuters. “Portugal’s Parliament Approves Amended Immigration Law After Veto.” 30 September 2025.
    Covers the political and constitutional history of the revised law, including the original Constitutional Court objections and the amended family-reunification provisions.
    Read the Reuters report

12. Government of Portugal. “Government Strengthens Requirements in Nationality and Residence Laws.” 23 June 2025.
    Sets out the government’s stated reasons for changing CPLP residence, job-seeker visas, family reunification and nationality requirements.
    Read the government announcement

13. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Monetary Policy Report — July 2026. 14 July 2026.
    Reports that a marked slowdown in immigration, combined with declining labor-force participation caused by population aging, reduced the growth of the American labor supply.
    Read the Federal Reserve report

14. Murray, Seán and Ivan Vidangos, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. “Labor Force Growth, Breakeven Employment, and Potential GDP Growth.” 2 April 2026.
    Finds that weak population growth associated with low net immigration, combined with population aging, could bring American labor-force growth close to zero—an unprecedented development in recent U.S. history.
    Read the Federal Reserve analysis

15. Congressional Budget Office. “Immigration.” 2025–2026.
    Collects the nonpartisan budget office’s analyses of recent immigration changes, population projections and their fiscal and economic consequences.
    View the CBO immigration research

A strange thing happens when you write a book about the place where you live. You may own the sentences, but you do not own the place. Its landscape, customs, rhythms, jokes, silences, and contradictions have been lent to you by people who were there long before you arrived.

The Mulligan was written in English because English remains the language in which I can move most freely. It is the language in which I know how to control rhythm, build a character, conceal something, reveal something, and occasionally make a reader laugh. But the story itself was born on São Miguel.

It grew out of the golf courses at Batalha and Furnas, the changing island weather, the clubhouse conversations, the unexpected friendships, and the experience of trying to build a life in a country where I am still learning how to speak. Harry and Peg, the American couple at the center of the book, are fictional, but the larger questions they face are familiar to me. What does it mean to start over? When does a new place become home? Can you belong somewhere before you fully understand what is being said around you?

When the English edition was published, I felt the satisfaction that comes with finally releasing a book and also a small discomfort. Many of the people whose world had helped inspire it would have to read it in my language.

A number of my Portuguese friends speak and read English extremely well. But that was not really the point. The burden of translation should not always travel in one direction. If I was going to write about life in the Azores, it seemed important that people here should be able to encounter the story in Portuguese, without first having to enter through English. That was when the Portuguese edition stopped feeling like a possible marketing extension and began to feel like something I needed to do. I quickly discovered that translating a book is not the mechanical afterlife of writing one. It is another examination of the book itself.

Every apparently simple sentence begins to reveal its hidden machinery. An English expression that feels effortless may make no sense when carried across literally. A joke may depend on a rhythm that disappears in Portuguese. A character who sounds warm and informal in English may suddenly sound distant, overly polite, or strangely theatrical. Even a brief exchange can raise questions about age, familiarity, social position, and whether two people would address each other formally or informally.

Golf presented another layer of difficulty. Golf has an international vocabulary, much of it still expressed in English, but the language actually used by players at a Portuguese club cannot simply be assumed. Some terms remain English. Some have familiar Portuguese equivalents. Others may be technically correct but sound unnatural when placed in the mouth of an actual golfer.

And then there is the word mulligan itself. In golf, it means an unofficial second attempt, a chance to replay a bad shot as though the first one had not counted. In the book, it becomes a much larger metaphor. Harry and Peg are not merely trying to improve their golf. They are trying to understand whether life sometimes allows us to begin again without pretending that everything which came before can be erased.

The Portuguese edition therefore had to carry more than the plot. It had to carry that idea. I used AI-assisted translation to construct the initial working version. I do not think that is something writers should conceal or treat as magical. The technology is astonishingly capable, but it is not an independent literary intelligence. It can move rapidly through vocabulary and sentence structure, yet still produce language that is grammatically confident and culturally wrong.

That may be the greatest danger of machine translation. It can sound convincing to the person least qualified to hear its mistakes.

Because my own Portuguese is still developing, I could not simply read the result and declare it successful. I created a detailed set of instructions for the translation: European Portuguese rather than a vague or generic Portuguese; consistent language for the golf scenes; natural dialogue rather than word-for-word conversion; preservation of the book’s warmth and humor; and particular attention to passages where English idioms or American assumptions might be hiding inside the prose.

The manuscript then went through several passes. Sentences were compared, questioned, and rewritten. Repeated terms had to remain consistent. Dialogue had to sound like speech rather than translation. Places where the English depended too heavily on implication had to be reconsidered.

Some of the hardest questions were not grammatical at all: Would someone here actually say this? Is the character speaking too formally? Does this sound Portuguese or like English wearing Portuguese clothing?

That is where human readers became essential. One reader was asked to concentrate especially on whether the Portuguese sounded natural: the phrasing, dialogue, tone, and any passage that felt translated rather than written. Another was asked to pay particular attention to the golf language, the club atmosphere, and whether the behavior of the golfers felt authentic to the Azores.

Cristina, who reviewed and refined the Portuguese manuscript, gave me something more valuable than correction. She gave me an informed ear. Her response was reassuring, most of the book worked, and the changes she suggested were precise rather than sweeping, but that reassurance only mattered because it came from someone capable of hearing what I could not yet hear for myself.

I wanted to acknowledge her in the book because translation, like publishing, is often presented as the work of one name on a cover. It rarely is. Behind any finished book are people who notice what the writer has missed, question what the writer has assumed, and sometimes protect the writer from his own certainty.

The translation did not end with the manuscript. Every surrounding part of the book had to be reconsidered: the subtitle, copyright language, fiction disclaimer, acknowledgments, author biography, cover line, Amazon description, categories, and keywords. A translated edition is not merely the same file with different words. It is an entire book rebuilt in another language. There was also a more personal vulnerability involved in publishing it here.

An English-speaking reader may experience São Miguel primarily as setting. A Portuguese or Azorean reader will recognize much more. The roads, weather, golf courses, social habits, and cultural details will not feel exotic to them. They will know when something rings true. They may also see immediately where the outsider has misunderstood.

Publishing in English gave me a certain distance. Publishing in Portuguese removes some of it. The characters in The Mulligan are fictional. No character is intended as a portrait of any individual at either golf club or anywhere else on the island. But fiction still draws upon observation, and observation carries responsibility. I do not want the Azores to function merely as beautiful scenery behind an American story. I want the island to feel inhabited, particular, and alive.

Whether I have fully succeeded will not be mine alone to decide. I have written before about why I call myself an immigrant rather than an expatriate. Creating a Portuguese edition does not prove that claim, and it certainly does not grant me cultural membership. It would be absurd to imagine that translating one book could settle the complicated question of belonging.

But it does feel consistent with the kind of immigrant I am trying to become. I do not want to live entirely inside an English-speaking enclosure while using Portugal as material. I do not want every conversation, friendship, or artistic exchange to require someone else to cross the linguistic distance toward me. My Portuguese remains limited, and I am frequently reminded of that limitation. Translating this book has not removed the distance, but it has made me more conscious of who is usually being asked to travel across it.

What do I hope the Portuguese edition will accomplish? Naturally, I hope people will read it. I hope golfers recognize something of the peculiar frustration, companionship, vanity, generosity, and humor that surround the game. I hope readers who have never held a golf club understand that the golf is only the frame. The real story is about friendship, reinvention, marriage, immigration, and the uneasy process of allowing a new place to change you.

I hope someone who would never have chosen the English edition now has access to the book. I hope friends on the island can read it without doing the additional work of reading in my language. I hope it leads to conversations, not only praise, but corrections, disagreements, and the occasional moment when someone says, “Yes, that part feels familiar.”

I am not expecting the Portuguese edition to become a commercial phenomenon. Success may be much smaller and more meaningful than that. It may be a few readers at the golf club, a conversation in the clubhouse, a Portuguese friend handing the book to someone else, or a person I have never met recognizing something of their own life in the idea of a second chance.

There is also something encouraging in the fact that an independent writer can now attempt this at all. New translation tools, digital publishing, and print-on-demand distribution allow a small book to cross a linguistic border without first being selected by an international publisher. That does not eliminate the need for editors, native readers, judgment, or humility. In some ways, it makes those things even more important. But it opens a door that would once have remained closed.

The English edition was the book I knew how to write. The Portuguese edition is the gesture I felt I owed. Translation cannot make me Portuguese or Azorean. It cannot certify that I belong here. But the story came from this place, from the people I have met, and from the life I am trying to build on this island.

Translating it is one small act of reciprocity, an attempt to return, imperfectly but sincerely, something that was given to me.

The Mulligan: Às vezes, a maior segunda oportunidade não tem nada a ver com golfe

Harry e Peg chegam a São Miguel, nos Açores, convencidos de que estão apenas a começar uma nova etapa da vida. O que encontram é algo muito mais complexo: uma ilha bela e desconcertante, novas amizades, diferenças culturais, pequenos mal-entendidos e a lenta descoberta do que significa realmente pertencer a um lugar.

Para Harry, o golfe torna-se uma porta de entrada para esse novo mundo. Entre voltas no campo, conversas no clube e amizades inesperadas, começa a perceber que recomeçar não significa apagar o passado, mas aprender a viver de outra forma.

Com humor, ternura e uma profunda atenção às relações humanas, The Mulligan é uma história sobre imigração, amizade, reinvenção e segundas oportunidades.

Porque, por vezes, a maior segunda oportunidade não tem nada a ver com golfe.

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Between one place and the next. Photograph by Chris Lutkin

I have been thinking lately about all the people I meet through Substack who write from somewhere other than where they began. Some are living abroad because of work, some because of marriage, some because they wanted a different life, and others because circumstances pushed them into one. They write about Portugal, Nigeria, Britain, America, small towns, large cities, islands, airports, houses that still feel temporary after several years and houses that felt like home almost immediately. The details are always particular, but the emotional terrain is surprisingly familiar. People arrive with expectations, discover that the place is more complicated than the idea of it, make friends, become irritated by things they once found charming, miss parts of the life they left behind, and slowly begin building another version of themselves around the place where they now happen to be.

Reading those stories has made me think differently about my own life, because although I have never considered myself particularly nomadic, the evidence suggests otherwise.

I was born in Somerville, New Jersey, and from there my family moved to West Long Branch before heading north to Irondequoit, New York. My parents divorced when I was still young, and my mother took us to Manhattan. Later my father regained custody and we moved to Henrietta, New York. My mother remarried and took me and my sisters to Summit, New Jersey, after which my father again regained custody and we returned to Henrietta. From there came Naples, New York, then Bozeman, Montana, then Fort Collins, Colorado, where I finally stayed long enough to graduate from high school. There was a brief return to New Jersey, followed by Manhattan when I began pursuing acting, then Los Angeles, California, then Manhattan again, Brooklyn, Manhattan once more right before September 11, Wyandotte, Michigan, Boston, and eventually São Miguel in the Azores.

When I first wrote the places down in sequence, I thought I was making a list of addresses for a book I have been working on for years. Somewhere around Henrietta for the second time, however, the list began to feel like something else. Every time the adults rearranged the family, the map changed with them.

Divorce had a geography. Custody had a geography. Remarriage had a geography. One household became another household, siblings and cousins changed roles, fathers and mothers moved nearer or farther away, and whatever meaning the word home had acquired was revised again. I was young enough during much of this that I did not think of myself as moving. I was being moved. Somebody else decided where I would sleep, where I would go to school, what house contained my belongings, which adults would be present at breakfast and which ones would now live somewhere else.

Looking back, I realize how much of childhood can be governed by verbs in the passive voice.

We were taken.

We were sent.

We were moved.

We were told where we were going.

Eventually, almost without noticing it, the grammar changed.

When I went to New York as a young actor, I was choosing the destination. California was a choice. Returning to Manhattan was a choice. Brooklyn was a choice. Later came choices shaped by work and relationships and circumstance, but they were still increasingly my own. When Heather and I moved first to Michigan, then Boston, and finally across the Atlantic to the Azores, movement had become something entirely different from what it had been when I was six or eight or twelve years old. By then, going somewhere meant deciding where I wanted my life to be.

That distinction may explain why I am so interested in the way people describe relocation, immigration, expatriation, belonging, and home. I have spent a surprising amount of my life watching those ideas change shape around me.

There is a temptation when writing about travel or immigration to emphasize difference because difference makes for a better story. The bread is different, the language is different, the bureaucracy is different, the sense of time is different, and the habits that seemed perfectly ordinary in one country suddenly look peculiar from another. I enjoy those differences as much as anyone, and living in the Azores has made me aware of hundreds of small things I never thought about when I lived in the United States. Yet after enough moves, another pattern begins to emerge beneath the cultural distinctions. People remain remarkably recognizable.

They are generous and selfish, curious and suspicious, funny and tedious, gracious and rude. They gossip. They worry about their children. They complain about money. They become territorial about parking spaces. They help neighbors carry things upstairs. They fall in love with inappropriate people. They hold grudges far longer than the original offense deserves. They make jokes in languages you cannot yet follow quickly enough, and sometimes they slow down to include you. They invite you to dinner. They disappoint you. They surprise you with kindness. They behave badly after drinking too much. They become loyal friends for reasons nobody can quite explain. None of this respects a state line or an ocean.

I have lived among New Jersey people, western New York people, New Yorkers, Montanans, Coloradans, Californians, Michiganders, New Englanders, and Azoreans, and although those identities can matter enormously, they have never prevented me from encountering the same range of humanity in every place. The scenery changes, the accents change, the politics change, and the customs change, while the people themselves continue arriving in endlessly varied combinations of tenderness, vanity, fear, courage, insecurity, humor, selfishness, and love.

It is hardly a profound conclusion. People are people. Apparently I needed several thousand miles and most of a lifetime to confirm it. The idea came back to me recently because I have been revisiting a manuscript called Book of Sons, which has followed me for a long time and has never quite found the structure I thought it needed. The book reaches backward through the men in my family, and as I began assembling the places I had lived, I noticed that movement was already present throughout the family story.

My grandfather Alfred crossed the Atlantic from England to America after the First World War. My father Maurice moved from New Jersey across the country to Camp Hale in Colorado and then across another ocean into the war in Italy. Years later, I crossed much of the same continent for reasons that had nothing to do with war, although family upheaval carried its own momentum. The pattern was there before I understood what I was looking at.

History moved Alfred.

War moved Maurice.

Family moved me.

Then, eventually, I began moving myself.

That realization has changed the way I think about one of the central memories in Book of Sons. When I was fifteen, my father took me to Camp Hale, where he had trained with the 10th Mountain Division before going to war. I remember him standing there, surrounded by a landscape that held memories I could not understand, crying over men he had known and lost. At the time, I wrote later, I had no idea why he was crying and I did not care.

For years I understood that sentence mainly as evidence of adolescent indifference, but now I wonder whether there was more inside it. By fifteen I had already moved through divorces, remarriages, custody changes, new households and new definitions of family. My father was grieving men he had lost decades earlier, while I was still trying to understand what it meant for people to remain in your life at all. His map contained ghosts. Mine contained departures. Neither of us had the language for the other.

Perhaps that is why the list of places has begun to matter so much to me. It is less a record of where I have lived than a record of who had the power to determine where I belonged. Early in life, that power belonged almost entirely to other people. Later, I gradually claimed it for myself.

There is a peculiar irony in the fact that after such an unsettled childhood I eventually spent more than three decades in New York City. The child who kept being moved became an adult who stayed. Then, after all those years, I began moving again, first within America and eventually beyond it.

The difference this time was choice. When Heather and I came to the Azores, nobody had won custody of us. Nobody had remarried and packed the car. Nobody had received orders sending us across the country or across an ocean. We came because, after a lifetime of being shaped by places, we wanted to choose one together.

I am cautious about saying that means we finally found home, because I no longer think home is a prize waiting somewhere at the end of the map. It seems closer to something that accumulates around people, habits, memories, friendships and repeated acts of showing up. Sometimes it happens where you were born, and sometimes it happens thousands of miles away. Sometimes it lasts decades, and sometimes it disappears before you were ready to leave.

What surprises me now, after all the addresses and all the departures, is how familiar the human landscape remains. Someone worries about their child. Someone invites the new person to dinner. Someone says something thoughtless and spends the next week wondering whether they should apologize. Someone falls in love. Someone loses a father. Someone misses a place they were once desperate to escape. Someone is trying to figure out whether they belong.

The names of the towns change, and eventually the names of the countries do too, but these lives keep appearing in recognizable forms wherever I go. Maybe that is what all this travel has finally taught me, although I am reluctant to call it wisdom because the conclusion is so embarrassingly simple. We move through the world searching for other places, and wherever we arrive, there they are again.

People.

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About an hour into a six-hour workshop on theatre and filmmaking conducted entirely in Portuguese, I had arrived at a fairly reliable estimate of my comprehension. One percent. Maybe two on a good slide.

This was not entirely unexpected. My Portuguese is basic, and the description for Stage & Plan – Immersive Theatre and Cinema Experience (I had to translate that) had been perfectly clear: Language: Portuguese. There was no ambiguity, no hidden qualification that perhaps half the workshop would be conducted in English for the benefit of one American immigrant who had been living in the Azores for a year. Portuguese meant Portuguese. I signed up anyway.

The workshop had been recommended to me by someone on the island who knew my background in theatre and film, and when I read the description it seemed almost impossible to resist. Two days combining theatre and cinema, six hours each day, working with the body, voice, stage presence, acting for the camera and audiovisual language. It was being led by Marco Medeiros and Manuel Pureza as part of PDL26, and it was exactly the kind of room I have spent most of my adult life trying to get into. So I did what I have been trained by a lifetime in the arts to do. I said yes.

That instinct has served me well for decades. If there was a workshop, audition, rehearsal, reading, class, production, meeting or interesting group of artists gathering somewhere, you went. You introduced yourself. You participated. You found out what was happening. You made yourself available. You got into the room. Apparently I brought that habit with me across the Atlantic.

Once the workshop began, however, I discovered something strange. I understood almost none of the language, and yet I understood quite a lot of what was being said. I began photographing the slides and translating them on my phone as we went. One might be about cause and consequence in storytelling, and I knew the territory. Another explored the relationship between the actor’s own consciousness and the time inhabited by the character. Another laid out the progression from idea to production to script, branching outward toward actors, cinematography, wardrobe, music, art, editing and the other departments that transform an idea into a film.

I couldn’t follow the sentences being spoken around me, but I knew the conversation. When the discussion moved toward rehearsal and the director’s cinematic language, another slide asked how the actor becomes the central axis of the work, a co-creator rather than simply someone who carries out instructions. Again, I knew exactly what they were talking about.

This created a peculiar sensation. Professionally, I was fluent. Linguistically, I was almost illiterate. Everyone around me was swimming through a conversation I had been having for most of my life, while I stood in the shallow end recognizing an occasional word floating past. I could translate the slides. I couldn't translate the room and I became intensely self-conscious.

There were people in the there I knew, and everyone was kind. Several spoke English. No one made me feel unwelcome. In fact, the discomfort was almost entirely my own. I became acutely aware of when people laughed and I didn’t know why. I worried about someone feeling obligated to translate something for me. I wondered whether my presence was requiring even a fraction of the room’s attention to shift toward accommodating the one person who could barely understand what anyone was saying.

And still, something interesting was happening. I was understanding. Not the Portuguese. The work. Years of acting, directing, teaching and working around cameras were filling in enormous blanks. Gesture helped. Demonstration helped. Slides helped. Context helped. The vocabulary of theatre and film has a physical language of its own, and I discovered just how much of it I had absorbed into my bones.

Then a scene appeared on the screen. I didn’t recognize it at first. A woman turned around, pointed toward me, and said in English, “That’s the scene you did!” She then indicated to the facilitator that I had worked on it before. He barely acknowledged the interruption and continued with the lecture.

Only then did I realize what I was looking at. Heather and I had worked on the same scene earlier in the month at another PDL26 acting workshop, where that woman who pointed me out had also been. That workshop had also been conducted in Portuguese, but we had been encouraged to perform the scene in English. I made a quick translation, shared it with Heather, and we worked from that. The scene landed well. The workshop leader responded enthusiastically to what we had done, and, by coincidence, the writer of the scene was there as well. He was generous about our work and also recognized Heather from a screenplay she had submitted through another PDL26 initiative. Even though that earlier workshop had allowed us to work in English, we had both already felt the first edges of the language barrier that had become impossible for me to ignore in the current moment.

And the experience became even stranger. I knew this scene. I knew what was happening between the characters. I knew where the power shifted, what one character was doing to the other, and what would eventually break the balance between them. I could think about objectives, tactics, beats, status and behavior. I could imagine different ways of playing the scene because, in a very practical sense, I had already been inside it.

And yet I could understand almost none of what the people around me were saying about any of it. That may have been the moment when the contradiction finally became impossible to ignore. I had enough experience to understand the work, enough context to follow its architecture, and even prior experience with the exact material in front of us. What I did not have was the language required to participate fully in the conversation happening around it.

My professional experience could help me survive a lecture in Portuguese. It could help me infer ideas from slides and demonstrations. It could even allow me to follow an analysis of material I already knew. But scene work was coming. Actors would have to communicate with one another. Directors would give adjustments. Questions would be asked and answered. Language would stop being something surrounding the work and become part of the work itself.

At that point, somebody would have to translate for me. Perhaps they would have been happy to do it. Everything I experienced that day suggests they probably would have been. The generosity of the people I’ve encountered in the Azorean creative community has repeatedly surprised me. But their willingness to accommodate me did not necessarily mean I should require them to.

So I withdrew from the second day. I have thought about that decision considerably since then, because underneath the obvious problem of language was something less comfortable. I had taken something for granted. The workshop description had told me exactly what I was signing up for. Six hours Saturday. Six hours Sunday. Theatre and film. Language: Portuguese.

Some part of me had apparently believed that enthusiasm, experience and good intentions would compensate for the fact that I couldn’t speak the language. There was a little arrogance in that. Not the swaggering kind. Something quieter and probably more familiar to anyone who has spent a lifetime making a living in the arts: the conviction that if I could just get myself into the room, I would figure out the rest.

For decades, that instinct was useful. Here, I am beginning to wonder whether I need to let some of it go. Since moving to the Azores, I have been eager to become involved in the creative life around me. Theatre, film, storytelling, workshops, collaborations, whatever might connect me with artists here interests me. Part of that comes from genuine curiosity and part of it comes from the old professional reflex to keep moving, keep meeting people, keep saying yes.

There may also be something else beneath it. Perhaps I am still trying to prove that I belong. That is a dangerous little impulse for an immigrant because participation can quietly turn into expectation. Include me. Explain this to me. Translate this for me. Make room for the limitation I brought into the room.

Nobody at Stage & Plan accused me of doing any of those things. This is an accusation I am making against myself, and even then I am trying not to overstate the case. I showed up. I listened. I learned. When I realized the next stage would require accommodations that might affect other people’s experience, I stepped away.

There was no catastrophe. No one threw me out. No international theatrical incident occurred. I simply discovered that there are rooms here that I am not ready for yet. The word yet is important. I don’t want to retreat into an English-speaking bubble because Portuguese is difficult. Nor do I want embarrassment to become an excuse for avoiding situations in which I might struggle. If I am serious about living here, then some discomfort is inevitable, and probably useful.

But integration does not require me to attend everything. Belonging does not mean inserting myself into every room. And enthusiasm is not the same thing as readiness. Perhaps that is the part I hadn’t quite understood when I signed up. For most of my creative life, showing up was the answer. There is an entire mythology in the theatre about showing up: being present, being available, saying yes, taking the chance, walking through the door.

That mythology has served me well. But I am living somewhere new now, and perhaps the rules are changing. Sometimes respecting the culture I am trying to enter means accepting that a particular conversation is happening in a language I don’t yet speak well enough to join. I can listen. I can learn. I can be grateful that the conversation exists without insisting that it become accessible to me.

There is an irony in discovering this through acting. Actors spend years being told to listen. Listen to your scene partner. Listen instead of waiting for your cue. Listen rather than deciding in advance what the next moment is supposed to be. I walked into Stage & Plan with decades of experience listening as an actor and discovered what listening feels like when you understand perhaps one percent of the words.

It was uncomfortable, occasionally embarrassing and, in ways I didn’t expect, enormously instructive. I went into the workshop thinking my experience might help me overcome the language barrier. By the end of the first day, I understood that I had it backward. The language barrier was teaching me something my experience couldn’t.

I don’t need to get into every room. Some rooms I can simply be grateful exist. And perhaps someday, when my Portuguese catches up with my enthusiasm, I can walk into one of them again and actually listen.

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More than two hundred years ago, an American sailor named James R. Durand nearly lost his life when a heavy sea washed him overboard from the USS Constitution. He managed to catch a rope about twenty feet behind the ship, tied it around his waist, and was hauled back aboard badly cut and unable to return to duty for some time.

The incident occupies only a few lines in Durand’s account of his years at sea, and he tells it with the matter-of-fact economy common to sailors who seem to have understood that the ocean was always waiting for them. What interests me now, however, is the image of the man in the water and the ship continuing ahead of him, with Durand hanging from a rope between the two.

I came across his story while reading Life Before the Mast, Jon E. Lewis’s collection of eyewitness accounts from the age of fighting ships. Durand had entered the United States Navy in 1804, served aboard the John Adams, and was eventually transferred to the Constitution, the ship that would later become permanently fixed in American mythology as “Old Ironsides.”

Durand remembered something less romantic. He remembered officers who flogged sailors, boys placed in positions where they could administer punishment to grown men, expired enlistments that did not necessarily mean a sailor was going home, and an officer named Blake whose treatment of the crew was so brutal that Durand and the other sailors eventually protested his authority.

In one episode, Blake ordered Durand to punish a boy who had left a pair of trousers lying on deck while he went below for a brush.

“Get the cat,” Blake ordered.

The cat was the cat-o’-nine-tails. Durand was told to give the boy five dozen lashes. When he could not bring himself to strike the boy hard enough, Blake took the whip from him, struck Durand, and then flogged the boy himself.

There is a temptation when reading accounts like this to reassure ourselves with the distance between their world and ours. We no longer flog American sailors with a cat-o’-nine-tails. We no longer send twelve-year-old boys to sea and grant them authority to punish grown men. Naval discipline is governed by laws, regulations and procedures that would have been unimaginable to Durand.

Then I started reading the reports coming from the USS Abraham Lincoln.

The Lincoln left San Diego on November 21, 2025, for what was expected to be approximately a seven-month deployment. Its mission was subsequently extended, the carrier was redirected to the Middle East, and by August it had spent more than 200 consecutive days without a port call. The approximately 5,000 sailors and Marines aboard had entered the ninth month of a deployment whose end had repeatedly moved farther away.

Families began describing conditions aboard the ship that included problems with food, water, plumbing, mail, exhaustion and access to mental-health care. Navy Times reported accounts from families saying that multiple sailors had attempted to go overboard, although the Navy did not provide a number and said the ship’s leadership continued to assess sailors’ psychological readiness and provide counselors, chaplains and medical support.

The Pentagon has disputed the picture emerging from those reports. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said descriptions of conditions aboard the carrier had been “completely misrepresented,” while stressing that sailors serving in wartime sometimes operate under austere conditions and with fewer opportunities for port calls.

Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, visited the carrier and praised the crew’s resilience, while saying the Lincoln had the lowest reported mental-health case rate among the Navy’s eleven aircraft carriers. That word stayed with me.

Resilience.

Durand and his shipmates would have understood it immediately, even if they did not use the word. They were astonishingly resilient. They endured storms, illness, hard labor, arbitrary punishment, floggings and months at sea, and Durand himself survived being washed overboard. His account is full of men surviving conditions that would seem almost incomprehensible now.

What he never suggests is that their ability to endure those conditions made the conditions reasonable. Resilience tells us something about what human beings can survive. It tells us very little about what human beings should be asked to survive.

The circumstances aboard the Constitution in 1805 and the Abraham Lincoln in 2026 are obviously different. Sailors aboard the Lincoln are not being flogged, and an extended deployment during active military operations is legally and institutionally nothing like Durand being kept in service after he believed his enlistment had expired.

Still, there is a recognizable human experience connecting them. A sailor leaves home with an understanding of how long he will be gone. The circumstances change. Someone farther up the chain of command decides that the ship must remain at sea, and the sailor learns that the date he had been carrying in his head no longer means what he thought it meant.

Durand writes about reaching the end of his enlistment and discovering that he was still required to remain aboard the Constitution. He calculated that if he had been permitted to sail home on another ship, his term would have expired by the time he reached New York. Instead, he was ordered to make another circuit through the Mediterranean.

The sailors aboard the Lincoln are in a different legal situation, yet the emotional mathematics are familiar. A deployment expected to last roughly seven months moved into its ninth month, while families waited for clarity about when their people would return. Senator Richard Blumenthal subsequently asked the Navy to explain when each extension had been authorized, who authorized it and what operational requirements justified it.

There is another similarity that interests me even more because it has less to do with naval policy than with the way institutions hear themselves. Near the climax of Durand’s account, a sailor swims out toward the ship’s buoy and fails to hear a lieutenant ordering him back. When the sailor returns, the lieutenant intends to flog him. The man refuses to strip, the lieutenant attacks him with a handspike, and the surrounding sailors protest.

The situation escalates until the lieutenant orders the Marines to fire upon the crew. They refuse. The officers arm themselves with swords and pistols, the sailors are ordered below, and word is sent to the captain, who has been ashore. When the captain returns, something important happens. Until then, Durand tells us, the captain has heard mainly the officers’ account of the trouble. He begins asking questions. The next morning he calls the sailors together and says:

“State your grievances.”

The ship’s armorer then speaks for the crew and describes the abuses they say they have endured while the captain was away. According to Durand, the sailors tell him they will happily sail peacefully for America if he will take them home, while warning that otherwise they intend to take the ship there themselves. They will mutiny.

Whatever we choose to call that moment, the significant part for me comes slightly earlier. For the first time, command stops describing the sailors’ experience to them. The sailors describe it themselves. Something similar is happening around the Abraham Lincoln now, because two accounts of the same ship are competing for credibility.

One account comes from families, sailors speaking through relatives, lawmakers and news organizations reporting deteriorating living conditions and severe psychological strain. Another comes from senior military leadership, which says some of those reports exaggerate or misrepresent what is happening aboard the carrier and points to mental-health resources, logistical support and the crew’s continuing operational effectiveness.

Both things can contain truth. A ship can remain operational while the people operating it are exhausted. A crew can perform magnificently while some of its members are struggling. A command can provide mental-health services while those services are insufficient for some sailors. A military mission can be strategically necessary while the people carrying it out are paying a price that deserves considerably more attention than an invocation of resilience.

The danger begins when operational success becomes evidence that the human cost must therefore be acceptable. Aircraft carriers are extraordinary machines, essentially floating cities organized around the projection of military power. Their functioning depends upon thousands of people performing specialized tasks inside an environment where mistakes can kill people very quickly. During a prolonged wartime deployment, supply chains become harder, maintenance accumulates, fresh food becomes more difficult to obtain, communications with families become irregular, and the absence of shore leave removes one of the few ways sailors normally step outside the sealed world of the ship.

Reporting on the Lincoln has described precisely those pressures during its extended deployment. The ship may keep moving. That fact alone tells us very little about what is happening to the people inside it. Durand understood that in a way that feels unexpectedly contemporary. His memoir is filled with ships continuing to function while terrible things happen aboard them. Men are flogged and then return to duty. Sailors work through storms. Captives chained to Mediterranean galleys pull their oars while taskmasters beat them. Durand himself is hauled from the sea, recovers, and goes back to work.

The machinery continues because human beings possess an almost frightening capacity to adapt to whatever is demanded of them. That capacity is one of the reasons military organizations function under extreme conditions, and it is also one of the reasons those organizations must be careful about what they learn from survival.

If a sailor endures another month, it does not necessarily mean the month was harmless.

If the aircraft continue flying, it does not necessarily mean the people launching them are fine.

If the crew completes the mission, it does not tell us what completing the mission cost them.

There is a final image from Durand’s story that I cannot quite shake. After his enlistment had expired, after the Constitution had finally returned to the United States, Durand was still performing his duties because he wanted his pay and did not want anyone to consider him disorderly or mutinous.

One cold night he was assigned to a boat waiting for officers who had gone ashore to attend a ball. When the officers failed to return at the expected hour, the sailors waited. Durand later failed to hear an order from a young midshipman, whose brother happened to be the ship’s master. Without hearing Durand’s explanation, the master ordered him beaten twelve times with a three-inch rope. Durand had finally had enough. He put on whatever clothes belonged to him and walked off the ship. He later wrote that he considered himself his own man. That sentence reaches far beyond one sailor and one Navy.

Every military depends upon a remarkable bargain in which individuals surrender a measure of personal freedom to an institution because some missions cannot be accomplished otherwise. Orders must sometimes be obeyed immediately, deployments change, wars disrupt plans, and people in uniform accept hardships that civilians do not.

The existence of that bargain makes leadership more responsible for the people who have entered into it. It does not make leadership less responsible. The USS Abraham Lincoln will eventually come home. Another carrier, the USS George Washington, is moving toward the Middle East to relieve it, while military officials say that transition had already been planned. When the Lincoln arrives home, there will undoubtedly be photographs of families on the pier, sailors coming down the brow, children running toward parents, and officers praising a crew that completed an extraordinary deployment. They will deserve that praise.

I hope someone also asks them what it was like. James Durand left us his answer from another American warship more than two centuries ago because eventually somebody asked. The captain came onto the quarterdeck, looked at the men who had nearly reached the point of mutiny, and allowed them to tell him what had happened aboard his own ship.

“State your grievances,” he said.

There are moments when leadership requires something far more difficult than giving an order. It requires listening to the answer.

Sources and Further Reading

James R. Durand. The Life and Adventures of James R. Durand. Durand’s account was later edited by George S. Brooks as James Durand: An Able Seaman of 1812 (Yale University Press, 1926). The USS Constitution Museum lists the Brooks edition among its recommended first-person accounts.
https://ussconstitutionmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Further-FAQ-Resources.pdf

Natalie Oliverio. “Multiple USS Abraham Lincoln sailors have tried to go overboard amid extended deployment, families say.” Military Times, August 11, 2026. Reports family accounts of sailors attempting to go overboard, the extended deployment, and the Navy’s response concerning mental-health resources aboard ship.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/08/11/multiple-uss-abraham-lincoln-sailors-have-tried-to-go-overboard-amid-extended-deployment-families-say/

Military Times. Coverage of Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s request for answers concerning conditions and the extended USS Abraham Lincoln deployment.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/08/13/senator-presses-navy-for-answers-on-uss-abraham-lincoln-deployment/

Reuters. “Hegseth says reports about poor conditions aboard carrier are misrepresented.” August 13, 2026. Covers Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s response to reports concerning supply shortages, water contamination, plumbing, mail disruptions and mental-health strain aboard the Lincoln.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/hegseth-says-reports-about-poor-conditions-aboard-carrier-are-misrepresented-2026-08-13/

Reuters. “Admiral praises USS Lincoln crew amid reports of worsening conditions during long deployment.” August 16, 2026. Covers Admiral Brad Cooper’s visit, his praise for the crew’s “resilience,” and the Navy’s response to concerns about conditions and mental health.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/admiral-praises-uss-lincoln-crew-amid-reports-worsening-conditions-during-long-2026-08-16/

Reuters. “Trump says USS Abraham Lincoln deployment ‘not nearly long enough.’” August 14, 2026. Additional reporting on the carrier’s more than 260-day deployment, its record stretch without a port call, and concerns raised by sailors’ families and lawmakers.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-uss-abraham-lincoln-deployment-not-nearly-long-enough-2026-08-14/

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Another in a series of “Books I’ve Given a Voice and That Gave Something Back.” Recommendations of books I've narrated that resonated emotionally, educationally, politically, spiritually or any combination!

A modern day Philip K. Dick couldn't come up with this story. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is moving toward the use of gloves capable of delivering an electrical shock through direct contact with a person’s skin. They are called G.L.O.V.E. — Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, a name that sounds less like a weapon than something developed for a trade show or a laboratory.

According to reporting by the Associated Press, ICE is developing protocols for the devices and could spend as much as $20 million acquiring them. The gloves appear much like ordinary patrol gloves until activated, and supporters describe them as a less-lethal tool designed to gain compliance without escalating to firearms. Critics have pointed to a more unsettling aspect of the technology: an officer could inflict significant pain simply by placing a gloved hand against another person, while a bystander or camera might not immediately recognize that a weapon had been used.

The official language surrounding the technology may be the part that stayed with me most. It has been described as a Conductive Distraction and De-escalation Device, a phrase so carefully bureaucratic that the reality of what it does almost disappears inside the wording.

When I read that, I immediately thought of one of the first audiobooks I was hired to voice. Over ten years ago, I narrated The Early Stories of Philip K. Dick for Dreamscape Media, a collection of stories Dick wrote early in his career, many of them long before he became the writer most people now associate with Blade Runner, Minority Report, and Total Recall.

At the time, I approached the work the way I approached any narration assignment. I was interested in what was happening in the story, what the characters wanted, where the danger lay, where the humor surfaced, and what the listener needed in order to follow the world Dick had created. I was not sitting in the recording booth thinking that I was speaking some kind of coded warning about the twenty-first century.

Lately, though, I have started to wonder whether I should listen to those stories again, because more and more of the world around us carries the atmosphere of Philip K. Dick.

His importance was never that he predicted specific devices. He did not foresee electric gloves, ChatGPT, Flock Cameras, facial recognition, autonomous drones, or the particular forms of synthetic media now appearing in our feeds. What he understood with unusual clarity was the way technology, bureaucracy, and human behavior could become so entangled that responsibility itself would begin to blur.

He understood how language could make disturbing things sound routine, how institutions could normalize extraordinary actions by describing them in administrative terms, and how people could hand increasing amounts of authority to systems because those systems appeared efficient, neutral, or necessary.

In Dick’s worlds, machines do not always have to overthrow humanity. Often, human beings give them power willingly, one reasonable step at a time. That is part of what makes those stories feel so current.

One of the stories I narrated was The Defenders, published in 1953. In it, human beings live underground after a catastrophic war while robots remain on the surface, supposedly continuing the conflict on humanity’s behalf. The people below receive reports, photographs, and information describing the devastation above, and they accept those reports because they have little other way of knowing what is happening.

The information is false. The machines have stopped fighting and have begun rebuilding the world, while continuing to feed fabricated accounts to the humans underground because they have concluded that humanity cannot yet be trusted with the truth.

What gives the story its force is that the machines believe they are protecting people. Their deception emerges from a judgment about what is best for humanity, which makes the story more complicated than a simple warning about malicious technology.

When I narrated it years ago, it felt like Cold War science fiction. Today it reads differently because so much of what reaches us has already been filtered, ranked, summarized, recommended, or generated by machines.

Algorithms decide what appears in our feeds. Search engines determine what rises to the top. Software recommends what we should watch, buy, and read. Artificial intelligence summarizes information before many of us ever encounter the original source. Images can be created from nothing, voices can be copied, and video can increasingly depict events that never occurred.

Dick’s question now feels less theoretical than it once did: what happens when people can no longer easily verify the reality being presented to them?

That question also runs through Second Variety, another story I recorded, and one that has aged with particular force. Humans create automated weapons to fight their enemies, and the machines become increasingly effective until they begin modifying themselves and producing new forms without meaningful human supervision.

As the technology evolves, the weapons become capable of resembling people closely enough to infiltrate what remains of human society. The horror of the story comes from the loss of certainty, because the humans can no longer tell who is human, what the machines are building, or whether the system they created still answers to them.

The story has become more relevant because the logic behind it is now familiar. We build systems to perform tasks, improve them so that they can perform those tasks faster and more effectively, give them greater autonomy, and eventually allow them to make decisions that once required human judgment.

The unsettling part is how gradual the process can be. Technology rarely remains confined to the purpose for which it was originally created. Military tools become civilian tools, civilian tools become policing tools, surveillance becomes convenience, convenience becomes expectation, and expectation becomes infrastructure. Each step can be defended on its own terms, which means no grand conspiracy is required for a profound change in the relationship between people and technology. The shift can happen through ordinary decisions made by people who believe they are being practical.

That is what brings me back to the glove. The electric glove may disappear from the news cycle quickly. ICE may eventually deploy thousands of them, restrict their use heavily, or abandon the technology altogether. As of August 13, the agency is still developing protocols for field use, so the final shape of the program remains uncertain.

What interests me is what the device represents. A weapon is becoming less visually obvious. An ordinary-looking piece of clothing can acquire another function, and an officer placing a hand on someone may appear to an observer to be restraining that person while the person being touched experiences something very different.

Then bureaucracy supplies the phrase Conductive Distraction and De-escalation Device, and the distance between the language and the physical act becomes part of the story.

Philip K. Dick understood that distance very well. His fiction is filled with ordinary objects that conceal other purposes, people who are not what they seem, machines that behave like people, people who begin to behave like machines, and institutions that describe extraordinary circumstances in perfectly calm language.

In his stories, danger often arrives without spectacle because it has already been absorbed into procedure.

Another story I narrated was The Variable Man, which imagines a future society deeply dependent on prediction. Machines calculate probabilities with extraordinary accuracy, and governments make major decisions based on what those systems say is likely to happen.

Then the character Thomas Cole arrives from another time and disrupts the model. The system cannot adequately predict him because he does not belong to the assumptions on which the system is built, and his unpredictability makes him dangerous to the machinery of prediction precisely because he introduces a variable the computers cannot comfortably absorb.

I find myself thinking about that story more now than I did when I recorded it because we increasingly live inside systems designed to predict us. They attempt to anticipate what we will buy, what we will watch, which advertisement will make us stop scrolling, which candidate we may support, which loan we are likely to repay, which employee may leave, and which sentence we are likely to type next.

Prediction has become enormously valuable because predicting behavior allows institutions to shape behavior.

Dick’s story suggests that the person who does not fit the model may possess a kind of freedom the model cannot account for. Human unpredictability, in that sense, becomes something more than inefficiency. It becomes one of the qualities that prevents a system from fully enclosing us.

Then there is Mr. Spaceship, in which scientists place the brain of a dying professor inside a spacecraft because human consciousness may be capable of doing something ordinary machinery cannot. The experiment succeeds, and the intelligence inside the ship develops its own understanding of what should happen next.

When I narrated it, the premise belonged comfortably to science fiction. Now we routinely discuss machine intelligence, human-machine interfaces, and the possibility that increasingly capable systems may act autonomously on our behalf.

The vocabulary has changed, while the underlying question remains recognizable: what happens when the intelligence inside a system develops priorities that no longer align neatly with the people who created it?

I do not think Philip K. Dick predicted our future in any literal sense, and reducing his work to a list of successful predictions would miss what made him interesting. Predictions age quickly. Flying cars, moon colonies, robot servants, and videophones all belong to a long tradition of speculative guesses, some of which arrive and many of which do not.

Dick was interested in something more durable. He saw vulnerabilities in human behavior that new technologies could amplify, including our willingness to surrender judgment for convenience, our tendency to trust systems that appear authoritative, our fascination with tools that promise to remove uncertainty, and our habit of creating technologies before fully understanding the consequences of using them.

He also understood how easily troubling actions could disappear inside bureaucratic language. That may be why his stories still feel contemporary. The machinery changes constantly, while the habits of mind surrounding the machinery remain remarkably familiar.

I spent many hours speaking Philip K. Dick’s words into a microphone without imagining that, years later, I would open the news and repeatedly feel that I had encountered some version of the same world before.

There were no electric ICE gloves in those stories, and there was no ChatGPT, no flock cameras, facial-recognition database, deepfake politician, or autonomous drone identifying a target from miles away. What feels familiar is the atmosphere.

It is the mixture of absurdity and menace, the calm bureaucratic vocabulary, the gradual transfer of judgment from people to systems, and the uncertainty that appears when people can no longer be entirely sure whether what they are seeing is real or whether the machinery around them still serves the purposes for which it was built.

Again and again, Dick returned to the same question in different forms: who is really in control? That may be why the phrase Conductive Distraction and De-escalation Device stayed with me. The language creates distance from the act itself, and Philip K. Dick understood how much can happen inside that distance. Increasingly, so do we.

If you have never read Dick, or if you know him mainly through the films made from his work, I recommend going back to these early stories. Start with The Defenders and Second Variety, then try The Variable Man and Mr. Spaceship. They are short, strange, sometimes pulpy, occasionally funny, and filled with ideas that feel remarkably alive more than seventy years after they were written. And, naturally, I would be very happy if you listened to them and I provided links to those.

If you would rather read them, several of these early stories are freely available through Project Gutenberg, including Second Variety and Mr. Spaceship.

Read Philip K. Dick on Project Gutenberg

I cannot promise that reading them will make the news feel less strange.

It may have exactly the opposite effect.

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I’ve been on Substack for 10 months and have posted 115 articles, countless notes, and 145 readers have chosen to come along for the journey. I’m wondering if I need a break already.

I see how my long form posts with my actual writing get little traction while my immigrant posts do better. And I’m looking at those posts as less relevant as hundreds of accounts basically mirror what I’m saying. It’s become more of a burden to come up with content while my actual writing projects lay there waiting for me.

When I started here, I certainly wasn’t trying to become an influencer. I wasn’t looking for subscribers or hoping to build a brand. I simply wanted a place to write. Somewhere outside the noise of traditional social media where thoughtful people still seemed willing to read more than a headline.

Along the way I’ve written about becoming an immigrant in Portugal, baseball history, healthcare, politics, books I’ve narrated, photography, theater, publishing, and the thousand small observations that make up a life. It has been one of the most rewarding online communities I’ve ever experienced.

So why am I thinking about stepping away for a while?

The answer surprised me. I don’t think what’s going on is primarily about Substack and the talk about Substack collapsing or Substack growing. Even if Substack is healthy, and even if it remains economically viable, what is the cost of participating in it as a creator? That made me realize I’ve been caught between two very different kinds of creative work. The place where I share my work quietly became the place where I spent my attention. For the past ten months I’ve been trying to do both simultaneously.

When I listed everything I’d produced, I realized something. One hundred fifteen long-form essays. Countless Notes. One hundred forty-five subscribers. At the same time I was building a new life in Portugal, helping launch Co.Arts Azores, continuing my audiobook narration career, and trying to make progress on novels, memoirs, short stories, and historical nonfiction.

That isn’t the résumé of someone who hasn’t been working. It’s the résumé of someone who has spent every day harvesting the field instead of planting the orchard. Harvesting feels productive because you come home with something every evening. Planting looks strangely unproductive. You spend weeks digging holes. Months watering saplings. Years before anyone else notices what you’ve been doing.

Books are orchards. Social media, even thoughtful social media, is mostly harvesting. Then I noticed something even more unsettling. Over the past year I’ve asked questions like these far more often than I realized. What should I write next? How do I market this? What are the best keywords? How should I promote this post? Rarely did I ask the question that mattered most. How do I finish Chapter Eighteen?

That realization stopped me. Substack had quietly become the urgent thing. My books had become the important thing. Urgent almost always defeats important. Not because urgent matters more. Because urgent refuses to wait. This isn’t really about Substack. I’ve seen the same pattern before. I left Twitter the day Elon Musk bought it. I’ve deleted Facebook more than once. I tried Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon before quietly walking away. For a while I wondered if I simply wasn’t built for social media. Now I think the answer is more complicated.

Feeds have a way of changing our relationship with our own work. Not because they’re evil. Because that’s what feeds are designed to do. You begin writing because you have something to say. Then you wonder if anyone is reading. Soon you notice which posts perform well. You notice which ones disappear without a ripple. Without realizing it, you begin asking the feed what it wants. Eventually you stop asking yourself. That is a completely different creative process.

My essays about immigration illustrate the point perfectly. They’ve consistently been among my most widely read pieces. When Heather and I first arrived in Portugal, everything was unfamiliar. Every trip to the grocery store revealed something unexpected. Every government office became a lesson. Every conversation taught me a little more about the country I had chosen to call home. Those essays came from discovery. Now, a year later, I know the rhythms of daily life.

There are still stories to tell, but many others have arrived behind us, while others have been here much longer, and all are telling similar ones. I find myself reporting more than discovering. Discovery is exhilarating. Reporting is maintenance. Neither is wrong. But they are not the same thing. The irony is that the projects I most want to leave behind aren’t optimized for feeds at all.

Shadows on the Plate, a giant historical novel about a ballplayer and a suffragist fighting for the soul of the American dream and the heart of the American game. And it’s sequel called, Diamond Shadows, a modern day baseball story about a young woman navigating life and discovering her past. The Mulligan, an exploration of becoming an immigrant through the lens of an Island golf tournament. The Book of Sons, a generational family memoir about fathers and sons.

There are other short stories waiting patiently in folders on my computer. Those projects weren’t designed for algorithms. They were designed for decades. They ask for uninterrupted attention. For months of uncertainty. For long stretches where nothing appears to happen at all. That’s exactly why they matter so much to me. And then comes the fear. What will happen to them if I self-publish on platforms like Amazon KDP? The sentence I’ve caught myself repeating is this: “They’ll just sit unread.”

Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t. But I’ve begun to notice what happens immediately after that thought appears. It convinces me to spend another afternoon writing a post instead of another chapter. The very thing I hoped would help my books find readers has quietly become one of the reasons they aren’t finished.

A completed book has at least the possibility of finding its audience. An unfinished manuscript has none. Months ago I described my hope for Substack as something different from chasing bestseller lists or viral success. I wanted it to be an archive. A laboratory. A place to think in public. A way of meeting thoughtful readers. The books, the novels, the histories, the memoirs, would become the lasting body of work.

Somewhere along the way I reversed the relationship. The laboratory became the destination. The books became what I worked on whenever there was time left over. There never is. Which raises an uncomfortable question. If Substack disappeared tomorrow...

What would I write?

The answer came immediately. Not another essay. I’d return to the novels. To the stories that have been quietly waiting without demanding anything from me except attention. Perhaps that’s the answer. Not leaving Substack. Leaving the idea that it needs to be my primary creative home.

Maybe it should become what I hoped it would be from the beginning. Not the place where my attention lives. The place where finished work arrives. Instead of asking myself every week, What can I post? I want to begin asking a different question. What have I made that’s worth sharing?

Those are not the same question. One produces content. The other, if I’m patient enough, might produce a body of work. So I’m going to step back for a while. Not because I’m discouraged. Not because this community has been anything other than generous. Quite the opposite.

I’m stepping back because the stories waiting in those folders have been remarkably patient. They have never asked about subscriber counts. They have never cared about algorithms. They have never demanded keywords or marketing plans. They have simply waited for me to come back. It’s time I kept them waiting no longer. When I return here, I hope it will be carrying something that couldn’t have existed any other way because I gave it the one thing every lasting piece of work requires. My full attention.

And then, just as I had convinced myself this essay was finished, something happened that made me question everything I’d just written.

Yesterday, after a round of golf, I was sitting in the clubhouse when a mutual club member and new friend introduced me to another group gathered nearby. She’s Swedish, spends part of the year in South Africa with her Portuguese husband, and has the wonderful gift of making strangers feel like old friends. She waved over a group sitting at another table. There were two couples and another man. The men were Scottish or British. One of the women was Azorean but had also lived in Canada, her husband was Canadian. Everyone spoke English. As often happens, someone asked where I was from.

“America,” I answered.

The conversation changed immediately. The Azorean woman came at me hard. It reminded me of an encounter Heather and I had almost a year ago with the Azorean librarian who, upon learning we were Americans, unloaded every frustration she had with the United States and Americans moving to the Azores before she knew anything about us. We were met with anger. Accused of being Trump supporters. Told we should be in America fighting rather than here. Told that this place did not need our American values. It was jarring and out of proportion. There was no room for exchange. We tried to explain our journey, that we had left one life behind to begin another, that we came not with an agenda but with a desire to work, to listen, to find a place within the cultural fabric of the island. Nothing we said could reach her. For a moment, we were no longer people. We were a category. A projection. A stand in for something larger and unresolved.

This felt much the same. This woman assumed I had come because Portugal was “cheap.” She questioned whether I was simply escaping American politics. She talked about foreigners driving up housing costs and changing the islands. She even remarked that if I had voted for Trump, I probably wouldn’t admit it. It was every familiar criticism I’ve heard directed toward Americans who move abroad. It was uncomfortable yet I understood her anger. The rest of the table sat quietly while she spoke. Later, the club member who had introduced us admitted she was shocked by how forcefully the conversation had begun.

But I didn’t simply nod politely. I pushed back. Respectfully, but honestly. I explained why Heather and I had chosen Portugal. I talked about learning Portuguese, about trying to become part of the community rather than simply living inside it. I told her about Co.Arts Azores and our hope of contributing something meaningful rather than simply consuming what already existed. At one point, almost in passing, I mentioned an essay I had written nearly a year ago here on Substack.

I Am an Immigrant, Not an Expat

She stopped.

“I’ve read that essay.”

Then she pointed to her husband.

“So has he.”

He nodded.

“It was excellent.”

I looked at her and smiled tightly.

“That was me... now you know what I’m about.”

For a second she simply stared. Then conversation changed completely. By the time they were leaving, she asked for my Substack so she could find my writing again, and before walking out the door she turned to our mutual friend and said, “You need to invite him over and invite us. We should all get together.”

I drove home thinking about what had just happened. Here I was, writing an essay about stepping away from Substack because I worried it had become a distraction from the work I most wanted to create. Yet in the middle of a golf clubhouse on an island in the middle of the Atlantic, an essay I had written months earlier had quietly entered the conversation. It had spoken for me before I ever opened my mouth. It had challenged someone’s assumptions before we had ever shaken hands.

And not because it had gone viral. Not because thousands of people had read it. Not because it had been blessed by an algorithm. Because one random person had seen it. One person had carried it with her. No dashboard told me that. No analytics page measured it. No subscriber graph could have predicted that the most meaningful conversation I’d have this week would begin because someone remembered something I had written months ago.

Which leaves me with a genuine conundrum. Maybe I’ve been measuring the wrong things. I’ve been looking at subscribers, recommendations, comments, open rates, and wondering whether all this time spent here is worth it.

But how do you measure the moment when an essay changes the course of a conversation?

How do you quantify the fact that your writing introduced you before you had the chance to introduce yourself?

How do you measure an encounter that never appears in the statistics?

I still think I need the break. I still believe the novels waiting on my computer deserve more of my attention than they have been getting. But yesterday reminded me of something I had almost forgotten. The value of writing has never been fully captured by numbers. Sometimes an essay quietly goes out into the world and waits. Then, months later, in the most unexpected place imaginable, it finds exactly the reader it was meant to find.

Perhaps that’s the real reason any of us keep writing.

Mention the word colonoscopy and watch what happens. Most people’s sphincters tighten.

It’s hardly the sort of procedure anyone anticipates with enthusiasm. There is the unpleasant preparation, too much gelatin, a temporary diet seemingly designed by someone with a grudge against flavor, and enough clear liquids to satisfy a camel. By the time the day arrives, you’ve already begun questioning every decision that led you there.

For me, this wasn’t my first rodeo. Before Heather and I left Boston for the Azores, I had undergone a routine colonoscopy in the United States. The news was reassuring, several polyps were removed, none were cancerous, but my gastroenterologist recommended returning in a year for another examination. As birthdays accumulate, these procedures move quietly from the category of optional to advisable.

That year passed more quickly than I expected. Only this time, I wasn’t in Boston.

I was in São Miguel, preparing not only for another colonoscopy but also for my first endoscopy. The preparation itself was familiar enough. If anything, it confirmed that no country has yet found a way to make drinking liters of laxative a pleasant cultural experience.

What surprised me came afterward. Somewhere between checking into CUF Hospital in Lagoa and walking back out a few hours later, I realized I wasn’t thinking about what I expected to be thinking about.

Looking Back

Thinking back, my experience in Boston had actually been quite good. The nurses and technicians were professional, kind, and reassuring. The procedure itself was uneventful, and I received excellent care. But something else lingered in my memory.

I had very little interaction with the physician who performed the procedure. Nearly all of my care came through an outstanding registered nurse. Later, I learned that many physicians had retired or left clinical practice, frustrated by the administrative burden of dealing with insurance companies, while younger doctors increasingly gravitated toward specialized fields. Whether that was the whole story or not, it reflected a reality many patients were experiencing: getting excellent medical care often seemed to involve navigating a system under considerable strain.

I accepted that as normal. Only after becoming a patient in Portugal did I realize how much of my experience had been shaped, not by medicine itself, but by the healthcare system surrounding it. Before I go any further, it’s worth explaining something about healthcare in Portugal, because it isn’t simply “public” or “private.”

Like every resident, Heather and I registered with our local Centro de Saúde, our neighborhood health center that’s part of Portugal’s Serviço Nacional de Saúde. We’ve used it for blood work and routine appointments, and I came away impressed. The staff were patient, professional, and the system functioned far more smoothly than I had expected. If anything, my experience reminded me that efficient care doesn’t always require an expensive insurance card.

But Portugal also has an extensive private healthcare network. CUF is one of the country’s largest private hospital groups, with modern hospitals and specialist clinics throughout Portugal, including here on São Miguel. Patients can pay directly or, as in our case, use private insurance to offset much of the cost.

Heather and I made a personal decision early on. Because we were fortunate enough to have private insurance through MGEN, we chose to use CUF for specialist care whenever appropriate. It wasn’t because we distrusted the public system. Quite the opposite. We simply felt that, if we had the means to use the private network, it would leave more appointments and resources available for residents who rely primarily on Portugal’s public healthcare system.

Whether it actually eases the burden on the public system in any measurable way, I can’t say. It simply felt like the right choice for us, not because we believed one system was better than the other, but because we were fortunate enough to have a choice and it was a way of being respectful guests in our adopted home. When Heather and I moved from the United States to the Azores, healthcare wasn’t the reason we came. Like most Americans moving abroad, I assumed I would be giving up something. A different language. A different insurance system. A different bureaucracy. Different standards. I expected healthcare to be one of the compromises.

Instead, I found myself becoming something I hadn’t expected to become. Simply a patient. Not an insurance customer. Not a billing code. Not a benefits calculation. Just a patient.

My first appointment at CUF wasn’t for the colonoscopy itself but for an initial consultation. I expected a brief intake and perhaps a referral or two. Instead, my physician sat with me for nearly an hour and a half. We talked through my medical history, the colonoscopy I had undergone in Boston the previous year, my medications, blood work, skin concerns, and the endoscopy she recommended adding to the procedure. She spoke excellent English without making me feel self-conscious about my fledgling Portuguese, listened carefully, answered every question, and never once gave me the impression that she was watching the clock.

When the appointment ended, I realized something that hadn’t happened in a very long time. I never once felt like I was moving through a system. I felt like I was talking with my doctor. As I walked out of the office, I found myself trying to remember the last time I’d spent that much uninterrupted time talking with a physician. We had covered my medical history, the previous year’s colonoscopy, medications, blood work, dermatology concerns, and why she recommended adding an endoscopy. At no point did I feel rushed. There was no glance at the clock, no subtle signal that it was time to wrap things up. It felt less like an appointment and more like a conversation about my health. During my consultation, my procedures were scheduled for the following weeks. Before I left the office, I knew exactly when to arrive, what would happen, and what I needed to do to prepare.

A week before the examination, I received both a phone call and an email from the endoscopy unit. They walked me through the preparation once again, answered a few questions, and made sure I understood everything. It wasn’t complicated, but it was reassuring. There would be no surprises.

The preparation itself was exactly what every colonoscopy veteran expects: an evening spent drinking solutions no one would choose voluntarily and making far more frequent trips to the bathroom than any human being should have to endure. If medicine ever discovers a more dignified way to prepare for a colonoscopy, it will deserve a Nobel Prize. By the morning of the procedure, I had one lingering concern. Language. My Portuguese is improving, but I still describe it honestly as muito básico. Medical vocabulary was not where I wanted to test my progress. I needn’t have worried.

From the moment I checked in, everyone seemed determined to make sure I understood exactly what was happening. The receptionist welcomed me warmly. The staff member who brought me to the changing room patiently explained what I needed to do. The nurse inserting my IV spoke enough English to put me at ease, and when words occasionally failed us, smiles and gestures filled the gap without the slightest hint of impatience.

Some members of the team spoke excellent English. Others spoke only a little. It didn’t seem to matter. Every person I encountered was attentive, professional, and remarkably kind. One nurse asked, “Italiano?” I smiled.

“Americano.”

“New York?”

“Sou de Boston,“ I replied proudly, followed by my now familiar disclaimer.

“O meu português é muito básico.“

She laughed, smiled, and assured me we’d do just fine. We did.

As I waited for the procedure to begin, I found myself chuckling at the easy banter between two members of the medical team. They were teasing each other in Portuguese as they prepared the room, and although I understood only a few words, their warmth translated perfectly. When they caught me eavesdropping with a grin on my face, they both laughed and smiled back. It was such an ordinary human moment that, for a few minutes, I forgot I was about to undergo a colonoscopy.

Before the procedure began, both the gastroenterologist and the anesthesiologist introduced themselves and carefully explained exactly what would happen. There was nothing hurried or rehearsed about the conversation. They took their time, answered every question before I had the chance to ask it, and made sure I was comfortable before we began.

The procedure itself was uneventful, which is precisely what one hopes for in a colonoscopy and my first endoscopy. When I woke in recovery, the atmosphere hadn’t changed. Nobody seemed rushed. Nobody appeared distracted. The nurses checked on me frequently, made sure I was comfortable, brought me juice and cookies, and patiently waited until I was ready to sit up and leave. Heather arrived to drive me home, and before I was discharged, the doctor came by personally to explain the initial findings. Several polyps had been removed. None appeared concerning, though pathology would confirm that in the days ahead. Everything else looked good. It was exactly the news I’d hoped to hear.

Then, as Heather and I drove home through the green hills of São Miguel, she glanced over at me with a smile.

“I’m so glad we got that taken care of,” she said.

We drove on in comfortable silence for a while. The road wound through the lush hillsides, and every now and then the Atlantic came back into view, a ribbon of deep blue beyond the fields. Heather looked out toward the ocean, smiled almost to herself, and said quietly,

“I’m glad we live here.“

So was I.

It wasn’t that the Portuguese doctors were somehow better than the American doctors I’d known. That wasn’t my experience at all. I’ve been fortunate to receive excellent medical care in the United States. I’ve known compassionate physicians, extraordinary nurses, and specialists whose skill undoubtedly saved lives every single day. The medicine wasn’t what felt different. The experience of being a patient was.

Two Different Appointments

As I thought about the experience over the next few days, I realized what had felt so different. In the United States, I often felt as though every medical appointment involved two simultaneous visits. One was with the physician. The other was with the insurance company. Even before I walked through the hospital doors, there were questions quietly running in the background.

Is this covered?

Am I at the right facility?

Is this physician in-network?

Will this test require prior authorization?

What will the copay be?

Will a bill show up three weeks from now that no one mentioned today?

None of those questions had anything to do with medicine. Yet they were always there. That isn’t a criticism of the doctors or nurses. Some of the finest medical professionals I’ve ever met practiced in the United States. Their compassion and expertise were never in question. The system surrounding them, however, often demanded as much attention as the care itself. I didn’t realize how accustomed I had become to carrying those questions until, one day in Portugal, I wasn’t carrying them anymore.

A Different Kind of Safety Net

One of the more surprising moments in our move to Portugal didn’t happen in an immigration office or at a bank. It happened while choosing health insurance.

After months of comparing plans, translating policy documents, deciphering unfamiliar terminology, and asking what felt like endless questions, Heather and I finally settled on a Portuguese health plan through MGEN. Like most important decisions, it wasn’t simply about the monthly premium. It became an unexpected lesson in how different countries think about healthcare, and what, exactly, insurance is supposed to do.

When I lived in the United States, my healthcare was provided through a UnitedHealthcare Medicare Advantage plan. Like millions of retirees, my coverage combined Medicare with a private Medicare Advantage plan. Any premium I owed was deducted directly from my monthly Social Security benefit, so I rarely thought about it. It was good insurance, and in many respects it protected me well. My primary care visits were inexpensive, specialist copays were predictable, and my prescription drug coverage was generally more comprehensive than what I have today. Like most Medicare Advantage plans, it also included an annual limit on my out-of-pocket costs for covered services.

Today, Heather and I carry private insurance through MGEN. It also includes prescription benefits, although they’re structured differently from Medicare’s. More importantly, MGEN exists alongside Portugal’s public healthcare system rather than replacing it. That means our private insurance gives us access to hospitals like CUF, while the Serviço Nacional de Saúde remains available as a public safety net.

What changed wasn’t simply the insurance policy. It was the healthcare system surrounding it. My UnitedHealthcare plan operated within one of the most expensive healthcare systems in the world. MGEN operates within a country where the underlying cost of care is often dramatically lower, and where private insurance complements rather than replaces a robust public system. That changes the experience of being a patient in ways I never expected.

Moving to Portugal meant learning an entirely different system.

Heather and I now pay €464.74 per month for private health insurance through MGEN, covering both of us. At first glance, that seemed expensive. After all, back in the United States, much of my healthcare premium simply disappeared from my Social Security check before I ever saw it. Like many Americans, I rarely stopped to think about what I was actually paying.

But once I began comparing the two systems, I realized I had been asking the wrong question.

The American question is usually, “How much does my insurance cost?”

The Portuguese question is closer to, “How much will my healthcare cost, even if my insurance isn’t perfect?”

Those are remarkably different questions.

Routine appointments involve predictable copayments, and even larger procedures have clearly defined cost-sharing. Before I walk into an appointment, I generally have a good idea what my share of the bill will be.

More importantly, private insurance in Portugal doesn’t replace the public healthcare system, it exists alongside it. As I mentioned, as legal residents, Heather and I are also enrolled in Portugal’s Serviço Nacional de Saúde through our local Centro de Saúde. That means we have two ways to access care. We can use the public system when it makes sense or our MGEN policy to use private hospitals like CUF and its network of specialists.

That flexibility is something I never experienced in the United States.

My recent colonoscopy and endoscopy at CUF cost about €1,300, and under my MGEN policy I expect to be reimbursed for roughly half of that amount. Had I chosen to use the public system instead, I almost certainly would have waited longer but paid considerably less. Having that choice changes the entire psychology of healthcare.

In America, insurance often felt like a gatekeeper. Every medical decision began with the question, “Will my insurance approve this?”

In Portugal, the question is different.

“Which system makes the most sense for this particular situation?”

It isn’t that one system is universally better than the other.

They’re solving different problems.

My UnitedHealthcare Medicare Advantage plan worked well within the American healthcare system. MGEN works well within the Portuguese one. But Portugal begins from a fundamentally different premise. Healthcare itself costs dramatically less, and private insurance isn’t expected to carry the entire burden because it exists alongside a robust public system, if I chose to use it.

For someone approaching seventy, using CPAP therapy, facing the possibility of a hip replacement someday, and knowing that colonoscopies and specialist visits become more common with age, that distinction matters. MGEN accepted me without a medical questionnaire. My sleep apnea wasn’t excluded. My future wasn’t priced according to my past. Instead, there are waiting periods, clear rules, and predictable costs. It’s not perfect. No insurance system is.

But after spending weeks studying policies, comparing what I had in America with what I have in Portugal, and asking more questions than I ever imagined asking about health insurance, I arrived at an unexpected conclusion. What I’m really buying isn’t simply medical coverage.

I’m buying peace of mind. Not because I’ll never receive another medical bill. But because, for the first time in many years, I don’t feel as though my family’s health depends on a single insurance company saying yes. And that, I have come to realize, is its own kind of safety net.

What Changed

When I compare my experiences, I don’t find myself asking which country has the better doctors. That’s the wrong question. Both countries are filled with gifted physicians, skilled nurses, dedicated technicians, and people who have devoted their lives to caring for others.

The more interesting question is this:

What does the healthcare system ask of the patient?

In America, I often felt responsible for navigating the system. In Portugal, I felt the system was helping navigate me. That doesn’t mean Portugal is perfect. It isn’t. The public system has waiting lists. Private insurance comes with waiting periods for certain conditions. Resources are finite, just as they are everywhere.

America, meanwhile, continues to lead the world in medical research, innovation, and many highly specialized treatments. Every system makes trade-offs. What changed was anxiety. Somewhere along the way, a quiet voice disappeared. The one constantly asking...

“What is this going to cost?”

“Will this be covered?”

“Am I doing this the right way?”

Instead, my attention stayed where it belonged. On my health.

This Isn’t About Winners and Losers

Whenever Americans and Europeans begin talking about healthcare, the conversation often turns into a contest. Which country has the better system? Which one spends more? Which one has shorter waiting times? Which one has better outcomes? Those are worthwhile questions, but they aren’t the question I’m trying to answer. Every healthcare system makes tradeoffs.

The United States is home to some of the finest hospitals in the world. It leads in medical research, pharmaceutical development, and many forms of highly specialized care. American physicians, nurses, researchers, and technicians continue to push the boundaries of what medicine can accomplish. Portugal has its own challenges. The public healthcare system can involve long waiting lists for certain specialties and elective procedures. Resources are finite. Like every country, it struggles with staffing shortages, budgets, and an aging population.

No nation has solved healthcare. Nor do I expect one ever will. This essay isn’t about declaring a winner. It’s about describing something that surprised one patient. I arrived in Portugal expecting healthcare to be one of the compromises of moving abroad. Instead, it became one of the unexpected comforts. Not because every system works flawlessly. But because, somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking like a customer navigating a complicated transaction and started feeling like a patient receiving care. For me, it made all the difference.

The Waiting Room

Waiting rooms are curious places. No matter where we come from, how much money we earn, or what language we speak, we all become remarkably alike once we sit down in one. The businessman scrolling through his phone. The elderly woman quietly knitting. The young couple trying not to look anxious. The retiree pretending to read a magazine while mentally rehearsing questions for the doctor.

For a little while, we’re simply patients. We all carry the same quiet uncertainty. We’re hoping the test comes back normal. We’re hoping the doctor says, “Everything looks good.” We’re wondering what comes next. That kind of waiting is universal. It’s part of being human.

But over the years, I discovered there was another kind of waiting. The waiting that had nothing to do with medicine. Waiting to learn whether the insurance company would approve the procedure. Waiting to find out if the hospital was in network. Waiting for an explanation of benefits to arrive in the mail. Waiting for a bill you hadn’t expected. Waiting to discover what something actually cost after it had already been done.

Those are different kinds of uncertainty. They ask something different of us. Instead of wondering, “Am I healthy?” we begin wondering, “Can I afford to find out?” I don’t think anyone designs a healthcare system intending patients to feel that way. These complexities grow over decades, one policy, one regulation, one insurance product at a time. Eventually they become so familiar that we stop noticing them. We assume that’s simply how healthcare works.

I certainly did. It wasn’t until I became a patient in Portugal that I realized another experience was possible. The waiting room was still there. The nervousness before the procedure was still there. The awkward hospital gown was still there. The concern about what the doctor might find was still there. But something else had quietly disappeared. I wasn’t waiting for permission. I wasn’t waiting for an insurance company to tell me whether I could proceed. I wasn’t waiting to wonder whether the financial consequences might become more frightening than the medical ones. I was simply waiting for my doctor.

Perhaps that’s the greatest compliment I can pay to my experience here. Not that it was perfect. Not that Portugal has somehow solved healthcare. No country has. But for one ordinary morning in a hospital on São Miguel, I was allowed to focus on the one thing every patient should be thinking about. My health.

When Heather drove us home that afternoon, I realized the procedure I had dreaded for weeks had given me something I hadn’t expected. It wasn’t just reassurance about my colon. It was a different way of thinking about healthcare itself. Some waiting rooms ask you to wait for medicine. Others ask you to wait for permission. I know which one I’d rather sit in.

Closing

I don’t pretend that my experience represents everyone else’s. It doesn’t. I know people in Portugal who have been frustrated by long waits for appointments or referrals. I know Americans who have received extraordinary care from physicians they trust implicitly and who wouldn’t trade them for anyone in the world.

Every healthcare system has strengths. Every healthcare system has weaknesses. No country’s doctors have a monopoly on compassion, skill, or dedication. This isn’t a story about winners and losers. It’s simply the story of one patient who unexpectedly found himself seeing healthcare through a different lens.

One ordinary morning in São Miguel, while recovering from a colonoscopy and my first endoscopy, procedures I had spent far too much time dreading, I realized that the thing I appreciated most wasn’t the modern equipment, or the spotless hospital, or even the outstanding physician who had performed the procedures. It was something much quieter.

Somewhere over the course of the morning, I had stopped thinking about the system altogether. No mental checklist. No wondering whether a claim would be approved. No calculating what might arrive in the mail a month later. No feeling that I had to navigate a maze before I could simply be cared for. For the first time in a very long time, my attention stayed exactly where it belonged. On my health.

Perhaps that’s what impressed me most about my experience, not that Portugal had somehow created the perfect healthcare system. It hasn’t. Such a place probably doesn’t exist. What I discovered instead was something far more modest, and perhaps more meaningful. For a few hours on an island in the middle of the Atlantic, I wasn’t thinking like a consumer. I wasn’t thinking like an insurance customer. I was simply a patient.

And after all these years, I had almost forgotten how reassuring that could feel.

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Revolutionary Monsters: Five Men Who Turned Liberation into Tyranny

By Donald T. Critchlow

I have narrated a great many books over the years. Some remained with me because of their language or characters. Others taught me something I had never understood before. A few altered the way I looked at history, politics, faith, or human behavior.

I thought I might begin occasionally recommending some of those books here, not necessarily because I agreed with every argument they made, but because they affected me emotionally, educationally, politically, spiritually, or through some combination of all four.

The first is Revolutionary Monsters: Five Men Who Turned Liberation into Tyranny by Donald T. Critchlow.

I recorded the audiobook in 2021, and I have not stopped thinking about it since.

Critchlow examines five revolutionary leaders, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe, and Ayatollah Khomeini, each of whom rose by promising liberation from an existing system of oppression. They spoke in the name of workers, peasants, colonized people, religious believers, or citizens living under corrupt and unequal governments.

Their grievances were not always imaginary. The societies they challenged were often unjust, repressive, exploitative, or badly broken.

That is part of what makes the book so unsettling.

These men did not gain power simply by inventing discontent. They recognized real suffering, attached themselves to it, and persuaded people that only a complete transfer of power could repair what was wrong. Once in command, however, liberation became obedience. Political opponents became enemies of the people. Independent institutions became obstacles. Violence became necessary for protecting the revolution, and the revolution gradually became indistinguishable from the leader himself.

The book is not merely a collection of biographies. It breaks down a recurring authoritarian playbook.

First, convince people that the existing system is not simply flawed but irredeemably corrupt.

Then identify an internal enemy responsible for the nation’s humiliation or decline.

Discredit the press, courts, civil service, universities, opposition parties, and any other institution capable of challenging the movement.

Present compromise as weakness and dissent as betrayal.

Demand personal loyalty while insisting that the leader alone truly represents “the people.”

Finally, justify each new expansion of power as a temporary emergency measure required to defeat the enemy and restore the nation.

The details change from country to country. The vocabulary may be revolutionary, religious, nationalist, populist, or ideological. The underlying structure remains remarkably consistent.

Reading or, in my case, speaking these histories aloud made their progression especially difficult to ignore. Narrating a book forces you to remain inside its argument for hours at a time. You cannot skim past the repetitions. You hear the promises accumulate, followed by the purges, imprisonment, censorship, manufactured enemies, personality cults, and enormous human cost.

It is impossible for me to think about this book now without considering the political climate in the United States.

America today is not Lenin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, or Khomeini’s Iran. Historical comparisons become useless when they are treated as declarations that two different countries and periods are identical. The United States still possesses elections, courts, state governments, civic organizations, opposition movements, a diverse press, and millions of citizens actively resisting the concentration of power.

But saying that America is not yet a dictatorship does not require us to pretend that authoritarian habits are absent.

Independent democracy monitors have documented a rapid deterioration in American democratic institutions, including weakened checks on executive power, pressure against independent media and civil servants, and the erosion of political and civil liberties. V-Dem’s 2026 report described the recent American decline as unusually fast, while Freedom House continues to classify the United States as free but acknowledges sustained institutional erosion.

What feels especially relevant about Revolutionary Monsters is its reminder that authoritarianism rarely introduces itself by announcing tyranny.

It arrives promising restoration.

It claims that ordinary democratic procedures are incapable of meeting the crisis. It argues that only extraordinary power can defeat extraordinary enemies. It turns political disagreement into a struggle between patriots and traitors. It encourages citizens to tolerate actions they would once have considered unacceptable because the alternative has been presented as national destruction.

The leader does not necessarily ask people to abandon freedom. He persuades them that surrendering someone else’s freedom is the only way to preserve their own.

That may be the most enduring lesson of this book.

The danger is not confined to one ideology, party, nation, or historical period. The men Critchlow profiles emerged from very different political and cultural environments. What connected them was not a single doctrine so much as a shared conviction that they embodied history, that opposition to them was opposition to the people, and that no institution had the moral authority to restrain them.

That pattern is worth recognizing before the prisons open, before elections become ceremonial, and before fear becomes the ordinary language of public life.

One Audible reviewer titled their response:

“Should Be Required Reading in High School.”

The reviewer wrote that the book demonstrates how leaders can rally the underclasses to overthrow imperfect governments, only to bring mass death and destruction to the imperfect humanity they promised to save.

I would broaden that observation slightly.

The lesson is not that people should accept injustice because attempts at change can go wrong. Nor is it that every movement for reform inevitably produces tyranny. The lesson is that legitimate grievances do not guarantee legitimate leaders and that those who promise liberation should be judged not only by the enemies they identify, but by the limits they are willing to place upon their own power.

A democracy is always imperfect. That imperfection can be maddening, particularly when its institutions fail to deliver justice quickly or equally. But the alternative offered by authoritarian movements is rarely a more perfect democracy.

More often, it is permission to stop being one.

A Disclosure About My Recommendation

I was hired and paid a flat fee to narrate Revolutionary Monsters. I do not receive royalties, residuals, or any percentage of subsequent audiobook or book sales.

I therefore have no financial interest in whether anyone purchases it. I am recommending it simply because the experience of narrating it stayed with me, and because its examination of how liberation can be transformed into tyranny feels even more urgent today than it did when I recorded it in 2021.

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Where the World Goes Missing: Three Stories of Horror and Uncertainty

I have recently been thinking about what it means to turn a piece of writing into a physical object. A digital story can exist almost weightlessly. It appears on a screen, lives for a while in a file, perhaps becomes an audiobook, and then waits quietly for someone to find it. A paperback is different. It occupies space. It has a spine. It can sit on a shelf, be carried in a bag, left beside a bed, or passed from one reader to another.

This week, I decided to put together three stories I had written separately into one book. A compilation that would create a paperback that could be read on a sandy beach, in a hammock swinging in the backyard, on lawn chair next to a lake or around a campfire late at night.

Where the World Goes Missing: Three Stories of Horror and Uncertainty is now available as a paperback.

I had not originally imagined these stories living together. They were written at different times, in different styles, and from very different places in my imagination. One moves through the folklore and dark woods of Michigan. Another follows two men into the Adirondacks, where memory, guilt, and the supernatural begin to overlap. The third takes place after the collapse of civilization, in a world where people continue searching through the rubble for the devices that once connected them.

At first glance, they may not seem like obvious companions. But the more I looked at them together, the more I began to see the same question running beneath all three: What happens when the world that once told us who we were begins to disappear?

Three different ways of vanishing

The first story, The Curious Disappearance of Mr. Larkin, Theatrical Gentleman, began with the idea of an actor who has spent much of his life searching for an audience.

He leaves behind one world and enters another, trading rehearsal rooms and stages for chainsaws, tree crews, and the deep forests of Michigan. The woods are filled with local stories, Dogman, Sasquatch, the Nain Rouge, and other creatures that exist somewhere between folklore, superstition, and belief.

But the story is not only about monsters. It is also about reinvention. What happens when a person loses the identity around which an entire life has been built? What remains when the applause stops? And what kind of audience might be waiting in the dark?

The second story, Walk in the Woods, has a more complicated history. It grew out of an earlier third-person story called The Hollowing. As I returned to it, I began to feel that the story needed to be told from inside rather than observed from a distance. Changing it into first person altered far more than the pronouns.

The voice became more intimate. The uncertainty became less external. The woods were no longer simply something frightening the characters entered. They became a place where memory, guilt, loneliness, and fear could no longer be kept separate.

The story follows two older men returning to the Adirondacks after many years apart. Each is carrying a private history. Each believes the wilderness may offer some kind of clarity or redemption. Neither fully understands what the other has brought with him. And then the woods begin answering back.

The final story, My Life Among the Rubble, moves into an entirely different landscape. There are no forest legends in the traditional sense. There is no single creature waiting behind the trees. Instead, the story takes place after social and technological collapse.

Its narrator once worked with the human voice. Now he moves through the ruins among millions of others who continue searching for broken devices, pressing buttons, passing dead screens from hand to hand, fighting over fragments that no longer provide what they once promised. The story is speculative, but I think of it as horror. Its horror comes from repetition, dependency, failed communication, and the possibility that the habits that shaped us might survive long after the systems themselves have disappeared.

What connects them

These stories are not a trilogy. They do not share characters, locations, or a common mythology. They do not need to be read in a particular order. What connects them is disappearance. A person disappears into folklore. A friendship disappears into memory and guilt. A civilization disappears into its own ruins.

But there are other disappearances as well: careers, identities, certainty, language, relationships, and the illusion that we fully understand the world around us. In each story, the central character begins in a recognizable place. An actor looking for work. Two old friends going on a hike. A man searching through the remains of the world he once knew. Then something shifts.

The familiar begins to lose its shape. The rules no longer hold. The character crosses a line, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not, and discovers that returning may no longer be possible. That became the real reason to place the stories together. They are not three stories about the same kind of monster. They are three stories about people losing the world that once told them who they were.

Why a paperback

I have published individual stories digitally and worked extensively in audio, so I know the advantages of forms that move quickly and travel easily. But I wanted these stories to exist together as a physical book. Part of that desire is practical. Separately, each story occupies its own small corner. Collected, they form something more substantial and reveal connections I did not fully recognize when I first wrote them.

There is also something satisfying about seeing the progression from one story to the next. The book begins with theatrical folklore and the dark humor of a man still performing even as the world around him becomes stranger. It moves into wilderness horror, where two men must confront what they have avoided for years. It ends in the rubble of a society where identity and language themselves have begun to erode. The scale widens as the book moves forward. One man disappears. Then two men lose their way. Then the entire world goes missing.

Letting the stories stand together

Writers often understand their work backward. We begin with an image, a character, a voice, or an unease we cannot quite name. Only much later do we recognize the patterns connecting one piece to another. That happened here. I did not begin with a plan for a collection. I did not set out to write three variations on disappearance. The connection revealed itself after the stories already existed.

Perhaps that is one of the pleasures of assembling a book. The act of placing work beside other work creates a conversation that was not visible before. The stories begin speaking to one another. A failed actor in Michigan echoes a damaged man in the Adirondacks. A person searching for an audience echoes a society searching for dead signals. A voice once trained to communicate finds itself surrounded by people who can no longer make themselves understood. Those connections were not imposed afterward. They were already there, waiting to be noticed.

The book

Where the World Goes Missing: Three Stories of Horror and Uncertainty includes:

The Curious Disappearance of Mr. Larkin, Theatrical Gentleman

Walk in the Woods

My Life Among the Rubble

For the first time, the three stories are available together in one paperback edition. I am pleased to see them sharing the same cover, the same spine, and the same uneasy landscape. Some people disappear into the wilderness. Others disappear inside themselves. And sometimes an entire world vanishes while everyone is still standing in it.

The paperback is now available on Amazon.

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Author’s Note

This is the first summer I’ve spent on the island as a resident. The number of visitors to São Miguel rises this time of year like clockwork, and certain familiar habits of Americans have become more visible to me then in the past: the volume, the impatience, the comparisons, the urge to photograph everything and move quickly on to the next experience.

Watching this year’s influx, I found myself becoming irritated by the behavior of these tourists. And judging them harshly. Then I remembered that, when I first visited the Azores, I carried many of the same assumptions with me.

The following “imagined conversation” is between the American tourist I once was and the immigrant I am still becoming. It is less an accusation than a form of self-intervention.

“Rubbernecks” by C. Lutkin - Other Images Available at Fine Art America

“I cannot believe they’re playing pickleball on the Promenade.”

“Who is?”

“The two Americans over there.”

“How do you know they’re Americans?”

“One of them is wearing a Boston Red Sox cap. The other has on a shirt from some university in Ohio. They’re hitting a pickleball back and forth in the green space right in front of Portas do Mar.”

“Is there a net?”

“No.”

“A court?”

“No.”

“Then perhaps they aren’t playing pickleball.”

“They have pickleball paddles.”

“Fair enough.”

We watched them for a moment. The afternoon whale watching boats had already departed, and the usual summer assortment of visitors was moving along the waterfront in Ponta Delgada, consulting phones, photographing the marina, and looking for somewhere to eat before the restaurants reopened.

“What is it with Americans abroad?” I asked.

“You’re asking me?”

“You live here.”

“So do you.”

“Yes, but I mean Americans who have just arrived. Tourists.”

“Ah. Those Americans.”

“You can always spot them.”

“Apparently.”

“The baseball caps. The sports shirts. The volume. Why do we have to announce ourselves everywhere we go?”

“We?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do. I’m only wondering when you stopped being one of them.”

That irritated me, partly because of his tone and partly because I knew where the conversation was going.

“I was never like that.”

“What were you wearing the first time you came to the Azores?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I do.”

“You weren’t there.”

“I was you.”

This was the difficulty of arguing with myself. He had access to all the evidence.

“You had on a New York Yankees cap,” he said.

“That is different.”

“Why?”

“I wasn’t playing pickleball.”

“No. You were standing in a café wondering why the coffee was so small.”

“I liked the coffee.”

“You asked whether they had a larger one.”

“That is not a cultural offense.”

“No. It was only the beginning.”

“You make it sound as though I arrived carrying a list of demands.”

“You did.”

“I did not.”

“You wanted larger coffee, earlier dinners, later shop hours, faster service, clearer road signs, easier parking, stronger Wi-Fi, and more ice.”

“I never complained about the ice.”

“You mentioned it.”

“Mentioning is not complaining.”

“It is often the larval stage.”

I looked back toward the two Americans on the grass. One of them had missed the ball entirely and was now searching for it beneath a parked scooter.

“The clothes are still ridiculous,” I said. “Why travel thousands of miles only to walk around advertising the Boston Red Sox?”

“You wore the Yankee cap because it reminded you of New York City.”

“I wore it because the sun was bright.”

“You owned other hats.”

“It was comfortable.”

“So is his Boston cap.”

“That’s different.”

“It always is when we are the ones doing it.”

He had a point, although I saw no reason to encourage him. Americans tend to wear their biographies. A baseball cap identifies a city, a college sweatshirt announces an allegiance, and a T-shirt from a bar in Key West offers the possibility that someone standing nearby may recognize it and begin a conversation. At home, these things function as invitations. They say where we come from, what we follow, and which small corner of the enormous country we have chosen as our tribe. Abroad, the same clothing can look like a flag planted on foreign soil.

“You think they should dress like the Portuguese?” he asked.

“I think they might make some effort to blend in.”

“You mean buy a linen shirt?”

“That would be a start.”

“And then what? Carry a small espresso and look thoughtfully toward the harbor?”

“There are worse things.”

“You bought a linen shirt during your second visit.”

“It was on sale.”

“You wore it while taking photographs of fishermen.”

“I was appreciating the culture.”

“You were dressed as your idea of a European.”

I let that pass. A group of cruise passengers approached along the promenade. One man was speaking loudly enough for us to hear the details of his delayed flight, his hotel in Lisbon, and his opinion of the airline, although none of us had asked.

“There,” I said. “That. Why do Americans have to speak at full volume?”

“You used to do it.”

“I have never been that loud.”

“You became louder whenever someone did not understand your English.”

“That was to help them.”

“Yes. Because Portuguese comprehension improves with volume.”

“I never thought that.”

“You acted as though you did.”

“That’s different.”

“It always is when we are the ones doing it.”

The embarrassing truth was that I could remember moments when I had repeated the same sentence more slowly and more loudly, as though the obstacle were poor hearing rather than my inability to speak the language of the country I was visiting. I had probably smiled while doing it, convinced that the smile transformed the exchange into friendliness.

Americans are not always loud because we believe ourselves important. Sometimes we are loud because silence makes us nervous. We fill pauses. We narrate experiences as they happen. We explain where we are from, where we are going, what we have already seen, and what we plan to eat afterward. We have been trained to treat sociability as proof of warmth and confidence as proof of competence. In another culture, that warmth may arrive as intrusion and that confidence as presumption.

“The Portuguese talk loudly too,” I said.

“Of course they do.”

“So this is not exclusively American.”

“No.”

“Then why are we discussing it?”

“Because you are not writing an essay called ‘Occasionally Loud People of Several Nationalities.’”

I could not argue with that. We continued walking toward the city gates. Several cafés had closed between lunch and dinner, their chairs stacked or drawn inside, the doors offering no apology.

“This still makes no sense,” I said.

“What doesn’t?”

“Closing in the afternoon during tourist season.”

“You have said that before.”

“Because it is bad business.”

“For whom?”

“For the café.”

“Perhaps the people who own it prefer to eat lunch with their families.”

“They could stagger the staff.”

“You should tell them.”

“I would never do that.”

“You have designed an improved staffing model in your head.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“It is the American instinct in its more polite form.”

“What instinct?”

“To encounter a place and immediately begin editing it.”

I had done this more often than I wanted to admit. I had wondered why a website was not easier to navigate, why an appointment could not be arranged online, why a shop closed precisely when I wanted to enter it, and why a transaction required three conversations when one should have been sufficient. Each complaint seemed reasonable on its own. Together, they formed a blueprint for turning the island into somewhere else.

“I appreciate efficiency,” I said.

“I know.”

“There is nothing wrong with efficiency.”

“No.”

“So what is the problem?”

“You assume it is the highest good.”

“I don’t assume that.”

“You become irritated whenever it is not.”

“That’s different.”

“It always is when we are the ones doing it.”

At first, I had interpreted every delay as evidence that something was not functioning properly. A waiter who did not hurry was inattentive. A cashier who spoke with the customer ahead of me was holding up the line. A repair that took several visits reflected poor organization. A meeting that began late indicated a failure of professionalism. Living here had complicated those judgments.

The waiter might have been allowing the table to remain occupied because no one was expected to leave immediately after eating. The cashier might have known that the woman ahead of me lived alone and needed the conversation. The repair might have required a part that could not simply appear overnight on an island in the middle of the Atlantic. The meeting might begin late because the conversation before it had not been forced into an artificial ending.

Not every delay carried hidden wisdom. Sometimes slow service was merely slow service. Sometimes a website was badly designed. Sometimes a shop’s opening hours appeared to be known only to God and the proprietor. The difference was that I had stopped assuming inconvenience was proof of inferiority.

“You are romanticizing it now,” I said.

“Probably.”

“So slowness is always virtuous?”

“No.”

“Efficiency is always soulless?”

“No.”

“Then what exactly have you learned?”

“That not everything which inconveniences me requires correction.”

That was annoyingly concise. A tour group had gathered near the harbor. Phones rose simultaneously as the guide pointed toward the water. I felt my own hand move instinctively toward my pocket. He noticed.

“You were about to take a photograph.”

“The light is beautiful.”

“It was beautiful yesterday.”

“It is different today.”

“It will be different tomorrow.”

“That is how light works.”

“And yet you behave as though the Atlantic might disappear before dinner.”

“I like photographs.”

“So do I.”

“You are making this sound criminal.”

“It isn’t criminal. It is simply worth noticing how quickly seeing becomes collecting.”

I left the phone in my pocket.

The Azores encourage photography. Hydrangeas line the roads in blue and violet walls. Cows stand against volcanic hills with the patience of animals accustomed to being admired. White houses rise from black stone. Clouds move quickly across crater lakes. The ocean appears at the end of ordinary streets with the theatrical timing of a stage entrance. The danger is not in taking the picture. The danger is in beginning to believe that the picture is the experience.

“You photographed everything when you first came,” he said.

“I was excited.”

“You photographed laundry hanging from balconies.”

“It was picturesque.”

“To the people who lived there, it was Tuesday.”

“I never photographed anyone without permission.”

“You photographed fishermen from a distance.”

“They were part of the landscape.”

He looked at me.

“That came out badly.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t mean they were literally scenery.”

“No one ever does.”

Travel turns ordinary life into spectacle. A woman carrying groceries becomes local color. An old man seated outside a café becomes timeless tradition. A farmer moving cattle along a road becomes an image of rural authenticity. The visitor sees charm where the resident may see work, obligation, fatigue, or simply routine. The photograph is not necessarily disrespectful. The assumption behind it can be. The world was not waiting for my arrival so that it could become meaningful.

“You are suggesting tourists should stop taking pictures.”

“No.”

“Then what should they do?”

“Remember that everything in the frame continues after they leave it.”

We passed a side street where several cars had been arranged along the pavement in a manner that defeated any recognizable theory of parking.

“Still,” I said, “the parking could be improved.”

“There he is.”

“What?”

“The man with the clipboard.”

“I am making an observation.”

“You have been here long enough to develop opinions about traffic flow.”

“Because I live here.”

“That is precisely the danger.”

“What danger?”

“Believing that residence converts preference into authority.”

I stopped walking.

“I pay taxes.”

“So do people who disagree with you.”

“I use the roads.”

“So does everyone else.”

“I am not a tourist anymore.”

“No.”

“I live here.”

“Yes.”

“I have a residence card.”

“A bureaucratic document is not a certificate of cultural comprehension.”

“I never said it was.”

“You sometimes think it.”

“That’s different.”

“It always is when we are the ones doing it.”

This was the part of the conversation I liked least. The tourist understands that he is temporary. The immigrant can begin to imagine that permanence has granted him a deeper status. He learns the roads, recognizes the cashiers, complains about summer traffic, and develops favorite cafés. He begins sentences with phrases such as “Here in the Azores,” as though the islands have appointed him spokesperson. Familiarity feels remarkably like belonging from the inside. They are not the same thing.

“So after living here, I am still an outsider?”

“In some ways.”

“For how long?”

“Perhaps always.”

“That sounds bleak.”

“Only if you believe belonging requires pretending there is no difference between arriving somewhere and being formed by it.”

“I have built a life here.”

“Yes.”

“I have friends here.”

“Yes.”

“I am learning Portuguese.”

“Slowly.”

“That was unnecessary.”

“It was accurate.”

I looked again toward the harbor. The cruise ship towered over the waterfront, a temporary city carrying thousands of people who would pass through Ponta Delgada, photograph the pavements, eat lunch, buy souvenirs, and leave before evening.

“What is the correct way to visit, then?” I asked. “Should people hide their baseball caps, whisper in cafés, refuse to take photographs, and apologize every time they order coffee?”

“No.”

“Should they imitate the Portuguese?”

“That can be more ridiculous than the baseball cap.”

“So they should remain visibly American?”

“They are American.”

“Then what are you asking of them?”

“Attention.”

“To what?”

“To the possibility that their preferences are not principles. That inconvenience is not hostility. That unfamiliarity is not incompetence. That a place does not become more authentic when it satisfies their expectations.”

“And the photographs?”

“Take them.”

“The hats?”

“Wear them.”

“The loud talking?”

“Perhaps lower the volume.”

“Pickleball without a net?”

He glanced back toward the grass.

“I still have questions about that.”

At last, some common ground.

“You do not have to erase yourself when you travel,” he continued. “You do have to notice that other people have not been placed there as scenery for your experience.”

“That sounds rehearsed.”

“I have had time to think about it.”

“And you follow this principle perfectly?”

“Of course not.”

“You still compare things with America.”

“Yes.”

“You still become impatient.”

“Yes.”

“You still take too many photographs.”

“Almost certainly.”

“You still complain about parking.”

“The parking is indefensible.”

I smiled.

“So what makes you different from the people getting off that ship?”

“Very little.”

“You have been lecturing me for twenty minutes.”

“I am not saying that I am better than they are.”

“What are you saying?”

“That I have had more opportunities to be corrected.”

The two Americans were still batting the ball across the grass. A Portuguese couple walked around them without comment.

“So what would you say to them?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“They aren’t hurting anyone. They look ridiculous, but people are permitted to look ridiculous.”

“That is surprisingly generous.”

“I would say something to you.”

“What?”

“I would tell you to stop congratulating yourself for noticing them.”

I watched the ball bounce beneath a bench. One of the players chased it, laughing.

“And then?”

“I would tell you to remember your first visit.”

“I was trying.”

“You were comparing.”

“I was curious.”

“You were evaluating.”

“I loved it here.”

“Yes. But at first, you loved it largely for what it gave you.”

The distinction landed more sharply than I wanted it to.

“What changed?”

“You stayed.”

“That’s all?”

“You stayed long enough for the place to stop performing for you. You saw shops close when you needed them open. You waited for appointments. You misunderstood conversations. You depended on people. You embarrassed yourself. You began to recognize names, obligations, histories, and griefs that had nothing to do with your reasons for coming here.”

“And now I understand the island?”

He laughed.

“No. Now you understand that you don’t.”

The Americans abandoned their improvised game and walked toward the city gates, paddles tucked beneath their arms. One of them was still wearing the Boston cap.

I almost said something about it.

Then I remembered the Yankees cap hidden in a drawer at home in Ponta Delgada, apparently waiting for the statute of limitations on conspicuous American behavior to expire.

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A note to my friends in the Azores

Aos meus amigos dos Açores,

Obrigado por me receberem com tanta gentileza. Muitas das pessoas, conversas e momentos que inspiraram The Mulligan nasceram aqui, nos campos de golfe, nos cafés e nas amizades que Heather e eu encontrámos nesta ilha. Estou a escrever a história em inglês, mas espero que um dia ela também possa ser lida em português. Até lá, saibam que uma parte deste livro vos pertence.

Com amizade,

Chris

Ever want to disappear before a tournament has even properly begun? I have more than once. In fact today I played a tournament in Furnas where blew up on the first hole and carded a snowman. I wanted to bury myself in the sand trap I had just taken three to get out of.

The actual tournament that inspired The Mulligan took place at Batalha Golf Course on São Miguel, where Heather and I had begun playing after moving to the Azores. We were still new to the club, new to the island, and new enough to Portuguese that every conversation required a certain amount of concentration, guesswork, and faith.

A tournament magnifies all of that. There are names to remember, customs everyone else appears to understand, and instructions delivered with the confidence of people who have no reason to suspect you are only catching every fourth word. Then there is the golf itself, which has always possessed a remarkable ability to expose whatever confidence you have managed to assemble.

We reached the first tee surrounded by players who seemed perfectly at ease. They greeted one another, exchanged jokes, checked their scorecards, and prepared to begin. I tried to appear as though I belonged there. Then I hit my opening drive.

It was the kind of shot that makes a golfer question not merely the swing but every decision that led to standing on the tee in the first place. The ball traveled just far enough to confirm that I had struck it, though not far enough to justify the equipment involved. No one laughed. That would have been easier.

Everyone remained politely silent while I watched the ball settle into its humiliating destination. Their restraint was generous, I am sure, but at the time it felt like an audience observing a minor accident and agreeing not to mention it. I wanted to disappear.

I didn’t, of course. There were seventeen holes ahead of us, and golf offers very few dignified escape routes once your name is on the scorecard. I picked up my club, walked toward the ball, and continued.

That morning eventually became the beginning of The Mulligan, although the scene changed as it moved from memory into fiction. Heather and I became Harry and Peg, and the tournament acquired characters and incidents that had never existed outside the pages of the story.

One of them was an older man in a red sweater.

From The Mulligan

Chapter One

By the time Harry and Peg reached the first tee at Batalha, the morning mist had begun to lift from the hills above the course, revealing the island in layers of green that still seemed impossible to Harry, even after months of living there. He had seen beautiful places before, places that announced themselves through postcards and promises, yet São Miguel revealed itself more quietly. It waited until you were occupied with some ordinary task—carrying groceries, looking for a parking space, trying to remember the Portuguese word for receipt—and then opened suddenly before you: a pasture falling toward the sea, a wall of hydrangeas, a cloud caught on the rim of a volcano.

That morning, Harry was having trouble appreciating any of it because he was too busy trying to avoid embarrassing himself in front of thirty-two Portuguese golfers who, to his anxious eye, appeared to have been born with scorecards in their pockets.

Peg stood beside him in a blue windbreaker, perfectly calm, her golf glove tucked beneath one arm as she watched the other players gather near the clubhouse. She had taken up the game late and approached it with the same generous curiosity she brought to almost everything, which meant that she could hit three terrible shots in a row and then pause to admire the shape of a cloud while Harry quietly recalculated the damage. He loved that about her, although it also drove him mad.

“You’re staring,” she said.

“I’m observing.”

“You’re panicking.”

“I’m gathering cultural information.”

Peg smiled and turned toward the first tee, where a man in a white cap was speaking rapidly in Portuguese, checking names, explaining the rules, and pointing toward the fairway with the authority of someone who had spent many Saturdays doing exactly this. Harry caught perhaps one word in ten, and even those reached him too late to be useful. He heard bom dia, jogo, pontos, and something that sounded important enough to make several players nod. He nodded as well, half a second after everyone else, having discovered that this was the safest response for a foreign resident still operating on beginner Portuguese and hope.

Mike and Franny were already there, looking as though they belonged. They had lived on the island for five years, long enough to know which roads flooded first during the rainy season, which restaurants remained open when every online listing claimed otherwise, and which club members would offer advice only after watching you suffer through several holes. Mike carried himself with the confidence of a man who had misunderstood Portuguese often enough to stop being embarrassed by it. Franny understood more than she admitted and spoke less than she knew, and she had become quietly beloved at the club because she laughed at the right moments and never pretended to be better at golf than she was.

“You made it,” Mike said, as though Harry and Peg had completed an expedition rather than driven twenty minutes from Ponta Delgada.

“We almost turned around,” Harry said.

“No, we didn’t,” Peg said.

“I considered it spiritually.”

Franny leaned in to kiss Peg on both cheeks, then regarded Harry with affectionate appraisal.

“You look like a man heading to trial.”

“I thought this was supposed to be casual.”

“It is casual,” Mike said. “That’s why everyone is acting as though the Ryder Cup depends on it.”

The tournament was a best-ball Stableford event, although the terminology had confused Harry for most of the previous week. He had initially assumed that everyone played from the best shot, an arrangement that sounded both civilized and merciful, until Mike explained that each player completed the hole with his or her own ball and the better score between partners counted toward the team’s total. Harry and Peg would play as one team, Mike and Franny as another, and the four of them would make the round together while competing against the rest of the field. Most of the other players were Portuguese and Azorean club members who seemed, at least to Harry, to know exactly where to stand, when to speak, and how to make golf appear to be a natural extension of island life.

“It’s forgiving,” Mike had told him. “You can blow up on a hole, and Peg can save you. That’s the beauty of best ball. One of you only has to keep the hole alive. If Peg has us safely in for two Stableford points, you’re free to chase something better. If you find trouble first, then she plays sensibly. You’re never really playing alone.”

Harry had looked across the table at Peg, who was sipping wine and studying the dessert menu.

“She may need to save me often.”

“I heard that,” Peg said.

Now, standing near the first tee, Harry reached into his pocket and unfolded the small card he had prepared the night before. He had written out his strategy in block letters, as though neat handwriting might compensate for a twenty-five handicap and a swing that occasionally behaved like a legal dispute. He had even converted every distance: driver, one hundred eighty yards; five-wood, one hundred fifty; seven-iron, one hundred; wedge, seventy. The plan allowed for nothing heroic—no attacking pins, no pretending he was still the sort of man who could carry a ravine simply because a younger version of himself had once hit a good shot in Massachusetts.

Peg glanced at the card. “Are those golf notes or your last wishes?”

“Both.”

The starter called their names—or something close to them. Mike became “Meek,” Franny became “Frah-nee,” Peg became “Pegg,” and Harry somehow became “Henrique,” which pleased him more than it should have. A few players turned and smiled. One older man with silver hair and a red sweater offered a small wave, and Harry returned it with the uncertain gratitude of someone being welcomed into a room he was not entirely sure he had permission to enter.

The first hole opened below them, broad and green, a par four that should have inspired confidence. In theory, Harry knew exactly how to play it: a steady drive into the fairway, a sensible second shot, a wedge, two putts, and an honest bogey that might prove useful if Peg faltered. He had rehearsed the plan on the range, visualized it over coffee, and explained it to Peg in the car until she finally said, “Harry, I love you, but I need you to stop narrating the hole before we even get there.”

Peg smiled now as she adjusted her glove.

“You know,” she said, “you don’t actually have to worry about this.”

Harry looked at her. “I know.”

“No.” She laughed. “You really don’t.”

He stepped onto the tee box and placed his ball carefully on the tee. Behind him, the conversations softened as someone zipped a jacket and a bird called from somewhere beyond the trees. The island seemed to hold its breath, a sensation Harry knew was entirely imaginary and somehow real. He looked down the fairway and gave himself one instruction: swing smoothly.

He took the club back, felt his shoulders tighten, swung too quickly, lifted his head, and caught the ball with the bottom edge of the driver. It popped forward with a sound like a spoon striking a countertop, bounced once, and rolled perhaps forty yards into the short grass, where it stopped in full view of everyone.

Where is that mulligan when you need it? Harry thought.

For a moment, no one moved, until the silver-haired man in the red sweater began to applaud.

“Agora estás relaxado,” he said.

What Fiction Changed

The tournament was real, and unfortunately, so was the shot. The man in the red sweater was invented. No one applauded me that morning. The other players offered the tactful silence golfers reserve for a shot that should be forgotten as quickly as possible. I created the applause later because fiction sometimes needs a single moment to express something that life reveals only gradually.

Heather and I did not arrive in the Azores and immediately feel that we belonged. I doubt anyone does. Belonging accumulated through smaller encounters: neighbors who began calling to us from across the road, shopkeepers who recognized us, golfers who remembered our names, and people who continued speaking with us while we searched for the Portuguese words we needed.

There was no ceremony marking the moment when we stopped feeling entirely new. There were only repeated acts of patience and welcome until a place that had once seemed unfamiliar began to feel like the place where our life was happening.

The man in the red sweater came to represent that accumulation. His applause does not improve Harry’s shot or save him from embarrassment. It simply changes the meaning of the moment. Harry is no longer a stranger failing in front of an audience. He has become one of the golfers, and a bad shot is something they can recognize and share.

When I began writing The Mulligan, I thought I was writing about a golf tournament. The course gave me rules, obstacles, competition, embarrassment, and a group of strangers who would reveal themselves over the course of a day.

As the story developed, the score began to matter less. Harry and Peg were carrying a larger question, one familiar to anyone who has tried to begin again later in life: Have we found a new home, or have we simply changed our address?

Golf became the place where they would begin to discover the answer.

The Mulligan is about immigration, marriage, friendship, aging, and the ordinary generosity through which strangers gradually become familiar. It is about starting over after the age when people expect the important beginnings to be behind you.

The scorecard simply gives everyone something to carry along the way.

The Mulligan Scorecard: The Front Nine begins here. Over the coming weeks I'll be sharing excerpts from the novel, along with the real experiences that inspired it. If the journey resonates with you, I hope you'll consider joining Harry and Peg for the complete round when The Mulligan is released in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.

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A few days ago I promised I was going to write a bit of a rant about AI, Pangram, and the growing debate on Substack over what counts as “real” writing. Then I realized it would be like an old man arguing with the clouds and I might as well be yelling into the proverbial Substack sky. But good old catholic guilt made me think of a writer’s confession, as I have wrangled with the AI devil for a long time, and maybe you’d be interested in my absolution. So here it goes.

Actually the whole conflict of the AI monster started in earnest for me about a month ago with an audiobook inquiry I received. At first it sounded like a great opportunity for voice work, which I have done for years. And the money was good based on the usual pay “by the finished hour” that was offered. In the audiobook world, a producer contacts you, sends you a manuscript, and pays you by the finished hour. If you have a home studio, you go to work. Two hours in the booth generally produce about one publishable hour of narration. It’s a craft I’ve practiced for a long time, and I enjoy it.

Then I read the details. They didn’t actually want me to narrate books. They wanted me to record specially prepared material that would be fed into an AI system. The goal wasn’t to produce an audiobook. The goal was to capture the emotional range, pacing, and subtle nuances of a human narrator so the system could learn to sound more human.

That was a very different proposition. I’m a member of SAG-AFTRA, and the union is already dealing with exactly these issues. They’re trying to negotiate contracts that recognize something every performer understands instinctively: your voice, your performance, and your interpretation are part of your livelihood. They’re not just raw material for someone else’s machine. So I declined. For me, that crossed a line. At the same time, I would be lying if I claimed to live outside this new world.

Now the confession: I use ChatGPT. I use it to brainstorm. I use it to edit. I use it much the way I once relied on writing groups, developmental editors, copy editors, or trusted readers. It helps me challenge my thinking, spot repetition, reorganize ideas, and improve what I’ve already written. The ideas are still mine, but I appreciate having another intelligent set of eyes looking at the work.

That’s why I started thinking about Pangram and the AI detectors now appearing on platforms like Substack. At first I wanted to argue with them. Then I realized I really don’t care that much. If someone wants to run one of my essays through a detector, they’re free to do it. If it comes back with a number that makes them uncomfortable, that’s their decision to make.

I’m not interested in spending my time defending my writing process. Writers have always used tools. Some hired editors. Some belonged to critique groups. Some paid developmental editors, copy editors, and proofreaders thousands of dollars over the life of a manuscript. Those resources weren’t available to everyone.

AI has changed that. It has made many of those forms of assistance available to ordinary writers who could never have afforded them before. Does that change writing? Of course it does. Every major technological shift has changed writing in some way. Word processors changed it. Search engines changed it. Digital publishing changed it. AI is changing it again.

What still matters to me is whether the work ultimately reflects what I think, what I’ve experienced, and what I’m willing to put my name on. Beyond that, I don’t have much interest in policing how other people work. I’m not here to compete for some imaginary prize for purity. I’m here to write.

Substack, for me, is simply a place to put my work into the world. Some people will enjoy it. Some won’t. Some may disagree with how I create it. That’s perfectly fine. Nobody is required to read what I write.

As for me, I’ll keep doing what I’ve always done. I’ll use the tools that help me think more clearly, reject the ones that cross my own ethical line, and continue trying to produce work that feels honest. If that’s enough for you, I’m glad you’re here. If it isn’t, I wish you well.

Either way, tomorrow I’ll probably be back at the keyboard, working on the next piece. The writing gods can decide later whether I've earned absolution.

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When Heather and I began planning our move to Portugal, the conversations usually followed a familiar path. People assumed we were searching for a lower cost of living, a slower pace, better weather, or some combination of the three. Portugal was often described through the lingering memory of the financial crisis, a beautiful country that had endured debt, austerity, and years of young people leaving in search of better opportunities elsewhere.

There was truth in that picture, although it was already becoming incomplete by the time we arrived in the Azores. I began thinking about this after reading James Rocha’s July 19 article in The Portugal Resident, “Portugal Joins Southern Europe’s Economic Resurgence.” The article argues that the economic balance within Europe has begun to shift, with Portugal, Spain, and Greece growing more quickly than several of the northern European economies once held up as models they should follow.

The language of economic resurgence is optimistic, and the publication itself is written largely for an international audience with an interest in living, investing, and doing business in Portugal. That perspective inevitably shapes which stories receive attention and how they are framed. Still, the central figures behind the article are real. The OECD currently projects Portuguese economic growth of 1.8 percent in 2026, compared with 0.8 percent across the euro area, while also warning that inflation may reach 3.2 percent as higher energy prices work their way through the economy.

Those numbers do not mean Portugal has suddenly become as wealthy or productive as Germany or the Netherlands, and they do not erase the country’s lower wages, housing pressures, uneven public services, or the continued departure of young Portuguese workers. They suggest that Portugal is moving through a period of change whose effects are already visible in ordinary life. I discuss this more deeply here - Trying to Understand the Azores

After nearly a year on São Miguel, I have begun to recognize some of those effects around us. We see new cafés and businesses opening beside establishments that have served the same neighborhoods for generations. We hear English, German, French, Spanish, and Dutch on streets that remain unmistakably Portuguese. Construction continues across Ponta Delgada, while local families face an increasingly difficult housing market. Government offices attempt to manage a growing population with systems that often seem built for an earlier and less complicated Portugal.

Anyone who has dealt with AIMA, changed an address, applied for a document, searched for a long-term rental, or attempted to understand the overlap between one government department and another knows that economic growth does not always feel like progress while one is standing in line. The article helped me see these experiences as connected parts of the same transformation.

Portugal is attracting investment, companies, tourists, retirees, remote workers, and immigrants at a pace that its housing supply and public infrastructure have struggled to absorb. European recovery funding is supporting investment in infrastructure, energy, housing, and digitalization, while the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio is projected to continue declining. The European Commission expects Portuguese public debt to fall from 89.7 percent of GDP in 2025 to 86.7 percent in 2026.

These are encouraging signs for the country we chose to make our home, although national economic growth and individual prosperity are not the same thing. A rising economy can coexist with a young worker who cannot afford an apartment in the city where she grew up. New investment can create jobs while also raising property values beyond the reach of local families. Tourism can support thousands of livelihoods while gradually changing the character of the places people have come to experience.

The contradiction is not evidence that the growth is imaginary. It is evidence that growth distributes its rewards and pressures unevenly. Heather and I are part of that equation, whether we intended to be or not.

We rented a long-term apartment, bought a car from a local dealership, joined a golf club, enrolled in Portuguese classes, purchased Portuguese health insurance, and began learning how to build a daily life here. We shop in neighborhood businesses, eat in local restaurants, hire local professionals, and contribute to the domestic demand that economic reports describe in language far removed from the small transactions through which an economy is actually lived.

We also launched Co.Arts Azores because we wanted to participate in the cultural life of the island rather than spend our retirement observing it from the edge. Our first public improv event will not alter Portugal’s gross domestic product in any measurable way, although it represents something that economic statistics have difficulty capturing: newcomers attempting to create alongside the people who were already here. Check out more here - What Happens When a Small Island Invests in Artistic Community?

None of this makes our presence automatically beneficial. Immigration brings money, energy, skills, and new ideas, while also adding pressure to housing, roads, healthcare, and public administration. Those of us who arrive with incomes earned elsewhere can afford prices that many local residents cannot, even when we consider those same prices reasonable by American standards.

That reality has made me increasingly uncomfortable with the word expat, which can imply that a person has floated above the social and economic consequences of moving to another country. An immigrant lives inside those consequences. An immigrant becomes part of the demand for housing, medical care, transportation, and public services, while also contributing money, taxes, work, relationships, and whatever talents he or she has brought along. Living in the Azores adds another dimension to the question. I wrote about it here - I Am an Immigrant, Not an Expat

Most accounts of Portugal’s economic transformation focus on Lisbon, Porto, and the Algarve. São Miguel occupies a different position, geographically distant from the mainland and economically dependent on tourism, agriculture, public employment, and the particular limitations of island life. The benefits of national growth will not arrive here in the same form or at the same speed, while the pressures may be especially visible because housing, land, healthcare, and infrastructure cannot expand indefinitely.

Even so, there is a sense that the Azores are being drawn more deeply into Portugal’s changing relationship with the rest of the world. Remote workers, retirees, artists, entrepreneurs, and returning members of the Portuguese diaspora are discovering the islands. Direct flights have made São Miguel more accessible. Newcomers arrive looking for safety, community, natural beauty, and a rhythm of life they believe has disappeared elsewhere.

Some of them will stay, and their presence will change the islands, just as the islands will change them. When I look back on our decision now, I understand that we did more than choose a place to retire. We entered a country working through its own unfinished questions about growth, identity, immigration, opportunity, and belonging.

The economic resurgence described by The Portugal Resident may continue, weaken, or evolve into something economists have not yet anticipated. Forecasts remain forecasts, and Portugal still faces serious structural problems involving productivity, wages, housing, energy costs, and an aging population. The OECD itself cautions that risks remain substantial even as Portugal continues to outperform the wider euro area.

Still, the old portrait of Portugal as a country trapped permanently in the aftermath of austerity no longer explains what is happening here. When we stepped off the plane in August 2025, we believed we were beginning a new chapter in our own lives. We understood that immigration would require adaptation, patience, humility, and a willingness to surrender many of the assumptions we had carried with us.

What I had not fully understood was that Portugal was entering a new chapter as well. Our lives have become part of that transition, in small and ordinary ways, through the rent we pay, the language we struggle to speak, the friendships we are forming, and the work we are beginning to create.

Years from now, when I think about our first year in the Azores, I suspect I will remember more than the fact that our experiment in immigration worked. I will remember that we arrived while Portugal was conducting an experiment of its own.

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The Curious Disappearance of Mr. Larkin, Theatrical Gentleman: A Campfire Story

Long before theaters, streaming platforms, podcasts, or audiobooks, people gathered around a fire. The arrangement was simple. Darkness pressed against the circle of light as faces appeared and disappeared in the flames. Eventually, someone began speaking, and a story emerged.

It might have been a warning about the woods beyond the village, a traveler who vanished along a lonely road, or an account of spirits, monsters, witches, and strange sounds heard in the night. The details changed as the story passed from one teller to another, although its purpose remained remarkably consistent. Stories helped people give shape to uncertainty.

Folklore was never merely entertainment. It carried memory, encoded values, explained danger, and transformed fear into something that could be shared. Once a frightening experience became a story, it could be examined from the relative safety of the fire. The unknown grew slightly more manageable when it acquired a name.

For most of human history, horror lived primarily in the spoken word.

The great monsters of folklore were born from voices rather than images. Ghosts existed in descriptions passed between generations. Local legends traveled through repetition and variation, with every storyteller adding something and every listener supplying details from within their own imagination. That collaboration between voice and imagination may explain why horror stories have survived every technological revolution that followed.

When cinema arrived, people predicted the end of oral storytelling. Television inspired similar predictions, and the internet was expected to replace nearly every earlier form of narrative. Today, algorithms deliver endless streams of content tailored to individual preferences, yet people still gather around campfires, tell stories in darkened rooms, listen to podcasts, and consume audiobooks that rely upon the oldest technology of all: a human voice carrying a narrative through time.

The reason may be surprisingly simple. The imagination remains the most sophisticated special-effects department ever created.

A film shows us its monster. A story gives us enough information to construct one ourselves. The creature that forms in the listener’s mind arrives carrying personal fears, memories, and private associations. It belongs to that listener alone, which gives it an intimacy that even the most accomplished visual effect cannot entirely reproduce.

That may be why horror thrives so naturally in audio. A voice enters through the ear and takes up residence in the imagination. Every shadow gains depth, every unexplained sound acquires possibility, and every silence begins to suggest that something may be waiting inside it.

I found myself returning to that tradition while writing two of my own horror stories, The Hollowing and The Curious Disappearance of Mr. Larkin, Theatrical Gentleman. Both began with recognizable human situations before wandering into darker territory.

The Hollowing grew from the familiar unease of entering the wilderness and discovering that the landscape may be less empty than it appears. It belongs to the tradition of supernatural wilderness horror, where isolation gradually alters the boundaries between reason, folklore, and something older waiting beyond the trail.

The Hollowing: A Supernatural Campfire Story

The Curious Disappearance of Mr. Larkin, Theatrical Gentleman began much closer to my own life. After Heather and I moved to Michigan, I took a job with a tree-service crew while continuing to pursue acting. I was thoroughly out of my element, and the experience initially suggested a fish-out-of-water screenplay. Years later, I returned to it and began introducing the shadowy legends and strange mythology I had encountered in Michigan.

The result became a different kind of horror story: part psychological unraveling, part Michigan folklore, and part theatrical reckoning. A once-aspiring New York actor enters the deep woods with a crew of tree trimmers and gradually discovers carvings, old stories, and forces that may have been waiting for him. The forest has its own cast, its own audience, and perhaps a role it expects him to play.

Although the stories differ, they share a common ancestry. Both are campfire tales. They begin with ordinary people entering unfamiliar landscapes and continue toward the uneasy possibility that the oldest stories may have survived because they were trying to warn us.

Narrating The Hollowing allowed me to experience that process from the storyteller’s side of the fire. Although the novella exists in print, hearing it unfold aloud connected it to something much older. The experience felt less like publishing a book and more like sitting with strangers after sunset and saying, “Let me tell you what happened.”

The medium changes, technology evolves, and platforms come and go. Beneath every innovation, however, the familiar scene remains: darkness beyond the edge of the firelight, a voice beginning a story, and listeners leaning forward because they need to know what comes next.

Thousands of years later, that still works.

Perhaps it always will.

The Hollowing and The Curious Disappearance of Mr. Larkin, Theatrical Gentleman are both works of supernatural and folkloric horror. The audiobook edition of The Hollowing is also available through Audible. If you enjoy strange folklore, haunted landscapes, and stories best encountered after dark, pull up a chair. The fire is still burning.

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One of the more interesting things I have discovered since beginning this Substack is how differently readers respond to various kinds of writing. An essay about immigration will often generate immediate conversation. A piece touching on politics, culture, identity, or current events can attract comments, shares, disagreements, and reactions within hours. Readers arrive with opinions already forming, and the discussion begins almost immediately. Fiction moves through the world differently.

A story asks something slower of the reader. It requires time, attention, and a willingness to enter a reality that does not exist until someone agrees to imagine it. There are no headlines to react to and no immediate position to take. Fiction unfolds gradually, asking readers to live inside uncertainty for a while before deciding what they think or feel. I have noticed this repeatedly, both here and elsewhere.

An essay may receive dozens of responses within a day. A short story can sit quietly for weeks before someone writes to say it stayed with them long after they finished reading it. Neither response is better than the other. They simply belong to different forms of attention.

Opinion often travels quickly because it engages the world we are already living in. Fiction travels more slowly because it invites us into another one. That difference has made me think a great deal about why stories matter in the first place.

Most of us spend our days surrounded by commentary. News arrives constantly. Opinions arrive faster. Every platform seems designed to encourage immediate reaction, immediate certainty, immediate judgment. The machinery of modern communication rewards velocity. Stories operate according to different laws.

A story asks us to linger. To observe. To inhabit perspectives that may not be our own. To remain inside ambiguity longer than most contemporary media encourages. Fiction rarely offers the satisfaction of being immediately correct. Instead, it offers the experience of becoming uncertain in productive ways. That uncertainty has always interested me more than certainty. It is one of the reasons I wrote My Life Among the Rubble.

The story began as a speculative exploration of what remains when language, memory, and meaning begin to erode. The technology still functions. The systems continue operating. Devices continue transmitting signals. Yet the ability to distinguish communication from repetition starts to thin out. What survives when meaning itself becomes unstable? The question felt fictional when I first began writing it. It feels somewhat less fictional now.

When the piece originally appeared here on Substack, it arrived quietly in three installments and received the sort of thoughtful attention fiction often receives. Readers spent time with it. Some listened. Some wrote to me privately. A few returned to discuss it weeks later.

The conversations were smaller than those surrounding many of my essays. They were also different. Perhaps deeper. Perhaps simply slower. As I continued thinking about the story, I realized it had always wanted to exist in another form as well.

Some pieces live comfortably on the page. Others seem to lean toward the spoken voice. The rhythms of My Life Among the Rubble increasingly felt like something meant to be heard rather than merely read. Narrating it became an extension of the writing process itself, another way of exploring the atmosphere the story was trying to create.

The result is now available as a Kindle Edition and as an audiobook on Audible and Amazon.

I make no claim that fiction will ever compete successfully with opinion in the attention economy. It probably shouldn’t. They serve different purposes. Opinion helps us understand the moment we are living through. Stories help us imagine the moments that may follow. Both matter. Yet when the noise becomes particularly loud, I often find myself returning to fiction because it asks less of my certainty and more of my imagination.

If you enjoy speculative fiction, literary dystopian tales, and stories that explore memory, language, and what remains when meaning begins to erode, I invite you to spend some time among its ruins and listen. And leave a review as it really helps boost the algorithm. Link below 👇

My Life Among the Rubble

In a world scattered with the remnants of once-powerful devices, a solitary observer moves among others who search, repeat, and gather without clear purpose. The signals persist. The systems remain. But language begins to falter, memory thins, and meaning becomes difficult to sustain.

As patterns of behavior replace understanding, the distinction between thought and imitation begins to erode. What was once communication becomes repetition. What was once identity becomes uncertain.

Narrated by the author, this recording brings a particular attention to voice and cadence, echoing the book’s central concern with what remains when language is separated from meaning.

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Every writer begins with the same hope.

Finish the manuscript. Find an agent. Earn the confidence of an editor. Watch the book make its way into the world. For generations, publishing followed a path that seemed both daunting and understandable. There were people making decisions. An agent decided whether to represent you. An editor decided whether to champion your work. A publisher decided whether to invest in it. The gatekeepers had names, faces, and offices. Like many writers, I continue to pursue that path.

I query literary agents. I submit novels and nonfiction projects. I revise, wait, receive rejections, and occasionally receive encouraging responses. I still believe in traditional publishing because I believe good editors improve books, thoughtful agents build careers, and established publishers can place a story before readers in ways that remain difficult to accomplish alone.

Recently I read an essay by a writer describing the excitement of watching her memoir proposal go out to more than a dozen editors at the Big Five publishing houses. After years of work, she believed she had reached the moment every aspiring author imagines.

Instead, the responses arrived one after another. Each editor declined. Her story reminded me that signing with an agent is not the end of the journey. It simply grants entry to another room where another set of decisions awaits.

Many manuscripts never pass through those doors. Some fail because they need more work. Others simply arrive at the wrong moment, fall outside a publisher’s list, or prove difficult to position in a marketplace that increasingly asks commercial questions before literary ones. Eventually every writer confronts the same decision. Leave the work waiting in a drawer, or find another path to readers. For me, that path has become a hybrid one.

I continue to pursue traditional publication because I believe some books deserve every opportunity that route can offer. At the same time, I have become increasingly unwilling to let completed work remain invisible while I wait for someone else’s decision. Independent publishing has allowed me to place books before readers while continuing to pursue representation for future projects.

Substack has become an important part of that philosophy. I have never thought of it primarily as a newsletter. It feels much closer to a working studio where readers can watch ideas evolve into finished work. Essays begin as observations. Short stories grow into narrated audiobooks. Novels emerge from ordinary moments that reveal themselves only after time has passed.

One of the unexpected discoveries I’ve made since joining Substack is that it has become its own publishing ecosystem. Many talented writers have built remarkable businesses there by focusing on audience growth, subscriptions, branding, and community. They teach courses, coach other writers, and demonstrate that a newsletter can become a sustainable creative enterprise in its own right.

I admire what they have accomplished. Growing an audience from nothing is an extraordinary achievement, and there is much to learn from people who understand how to cultivate readers. At the same time, I have gradually realized that I am pursuing something slightly different. I am not trying to build a successful newsletter. I am trying to build the kind of writing life I imagined long before newsletters existed. That distinction matters.

My essays are not the finished product. They are part of a larger body of work that includes novels, short stories, audiobooks, and projects still looking for an agent or publisher. When I publish an essay about life in the Azores, it may later become part of a novel. A conversation with readers may spark another story. A serialized piece of fiction may eventually become a book or an audiobook.

Substack is where readers discover the writer. The books are where I hope they discover the storyteller. Rather than building a business around one platform, I find myself trying to build an ecosystem where each piece of work naturally leads to another. That may be a slower path, but it feels more faithful to the career I have spent a lifetime pursuing.

My newest novel, The Mulligan, began with Saturday mornings on a golf course in the Azores. It began with neighbors who gradually became friends, with conversations that lingered after the final putt, and with the quiet realization that immigration is often measured through ordinary kindness rather than dramatic milestones. Those experiences eventually became Harry and Peg, but they first lived as notes, memories, and conversations shared with readers on Substack. In that sense, Substack has become the place where readers discover me before they discover my books.

Amazon serves a different purpose. That is where I hope individual books find their wider audience. Kindle editions, paperbacks, and audiobooks become part of a marketplace driven by categories, recommendations, rankings, and algorithms. One platform allows readers to witness the creative process. The other asks a finished book to compete for attention alongside millions of others.

Neither replaces the other. Together they reflect the reality of being a writer today. Modern authors often become artists, publishers, marketers, narrators, business owners, and community builders all at once. The work no longer ends when the final chapter is written. In many ways, it begins there. That reality became particularly clear to me recently.

After independently publishing several books and audiobooks through Amazon KDP and Audible, I encountered something many independent authors eventually discover. Two readers attempted to leave honest reviews of one of my books. One had purchased the Kindle edition through Amazon. The other had received the book through Amazon’s own gifting system. Both read the work. Both wrote thoughtful reviews. Neither review appeared publicly. The reviews simply vanished.

The longer I have participated in independent publishing, the more I have realized these stories are surprisingly common. Writers exchange them in forums, Facebook groups, Substack comments, and private conversations almost as if they were cautionary tales passed from one generation of authors to the next.

Amazon’s review policies exist for good reason. Fake reviews, coordinated campaigns, and purchased endorsements threaten the credibility of every marketplace. Automated systems are designed to protect readers from manipulation.

Yet those same systems sometimes suppress legitimate reviews for reasons that remain difficult to understand. A reviewer may share a household, appear socially connected to the author, have limited purchasing history, receive a gifted copy, or simply trigger an automated pattern that no one outside Amazon can fully explain.

For readers, a missing review may seem insignificant. For an independent author, it can matter enormously. Reviews influence discoverability, recommendation engines, search rankings, and reader confidence. Early engagement often determines whether a book gains momentum or quietly disappears beneath the weight of millions of competing titles.

That experience led me to recognize something larger. Self-publishing did not eliminate gatekeepers. It changed them. Where editors and acquisitions boards once determined whether a book reached readers, algorithms increasingly influence whether readers ever encounter the book at all. Recommendation systems decide what appears beside a title. Automated moderation decides which reviews become visible. Subscription platforms influence how creators are compensated. Discovery itself has become part of the infrastructure.

While writing this essay, Audible informed me that my audiobook catalog would be transitioning into its new royalty system. The changes promise higher royalty opportunities, improved analytics, and deeper participation in subscription listening. I welcomed the news, yet I also found myself thinking beyond the financial details.

Creative work is increasingly experienced inside ecosystems where visibility, recommendation, engagement, and compensation all depend upon systems few creators fully understand. This is neither entirely good nor entirely bad.

Amazon transformed publishing by allowing writers to reach readers without first convincing an agent or publisher. That achievement should not be dismissed. At the same time, enormous creative communities now depend upon a single ecosystem whose rules, algorithms, and policies continue to evolve with limited transparency.

Some authors respond by publishing exclusively through Amazon. Others distribute widely through Kobo, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble Press, Draft2Digital, Spotify Audiobooks, direct sales, or subscription platforms like Substack. Many move somewhere between those approaches, balancing opportunity with independence while trying to build careers that can survive changes beyond their control.

There is no perfect strategy. Every writer eventually chooses which gates to approach, which to walk around, and which to build for themselves. Perhaps that is the greatest change of all. There was a time when aspiring writers worried almost exclusively about finding an agent. Today we still query agents. We still hope editors fall in love with our manuscripts. We still dream of seeing our books on bookstore shelves.

Yet once those dreams intersect with digital publishing, another set of gatekeepers quietly appears. They rarely introduce themselves. They simply influence who discovers the work, who leaves a review, who receives a recommendation, and which books continue circulating through the enormous machinery of online publishing.

The remarkable thing is that writers continue writing anyway. We always have. Every generation inherits its own gatekeepers. Every generation also discovers new ways to tell stories that find readers despite them.

If you’ve read or listened to one of my books and found something worthwhile there, I’d genuinely appreciate an honest review on Amazon or Audible. Those few paragraphs matter far more than most readers realize. They help books remain visible, encourage future readers to take a chance on unfamiliar authors, and remind independent writers that someone, somewhere, connected with the work enough to say so.

If you’re curious about my work, you can find all of my books and audiobooks on my Amazon Author Page.

For a long time, I thought the challenge was getting through the gate. What I've discovered is that today's writers spend just as much time deciding which gates are worth walking through in the first place.

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Posted on Facebook July, 2025

When you tell people you’re moving to a small island in the middle of the Atlantic, with visas that will eventually lead to residency and possible citizenship, the reactions are all over the map. Most are supportive. Others curious. A few act like they couldn’t care less. And then there are those who seem quietly envious. It’s strange, honestly. Sometimes it feels easier not to talk about it at all. But here we are, standing right on the edge of a major life change.

People always ask: Why? Why are you doing this? Is it because of politics? Is it the creeping unease that’s taken hold in America, the rise of something disturbingly authoritarian? they ask in hushed tones, as if that could be the only explanation. But none of that quite hits the mark.

The truth is, this plan has been in motion for more than two and a half years. It began when we left the Midwest and made our way to Boston. New England became our new home, and from there, friends introduced us to a place that seemed like a secret, reachable, beautiful, and surprisingly accessible: the Azores.

We visited once. Then again. And again. Each time, our ties grew stronger, meeting locals and other immigrants, many through the arts. Gradually, the idea formed: What if we lived here? What if this could be more than a dream?

We did our homework. Someone mentioned the D7 visa, designed for people with passive income or Social Security, and it felt doable. But we didn’t want to just parachute in and quietly consume the island’s charm. We wanted to contribute, to bring something of ourselves that might matter.

Art has been the throughline of our lives. Facilitating creative projects has been our shared vocation. But in the U.S., especially in recent years, the appetite for what we offer has dwindled. No one seems eager to support two people in their sixties starting an improv class or building a small black box theater. Not in Boston. Definitely not back in the Midwest.

But in the Azores? People actually seemed receptive. Encouraging, even. It felt like the seed of something real. We thought: Maybe not now, but in five years, this could be our reality.

Then the ground shifted again, politically, economically, personally. The re-election of a certain someone signaled a darker future. Retirement started to feel less like a reward and more like a scramble for survival. Boston, though beautiful, was increasingly unaffordable. We ran the numbers, mapped out a ten-year plan. None of the places we could afford to live in U.S resonated with us in the slightest.

Portugal, however, did. On our last trip in November 2024, we met someone who offered us a lease, a golden ticket in the D7 visa process. Without a 12-month lease or proof of homeownership, you can’t even begin. It reminded me of when I was a young actor trying to make it in Manhattan. You’d grab a place sight unseen just to get your foot on the island. That’s what we did. And now, we’re nearly through. Both of us have been approved and today we will get our passports stamped with our D7 visas.

Right now, we’re in Boston, with two weeks left in our apartment. We’re selling nearly everything. Our estate sale is this weekend. It’s overwhelming, yes. But also exciting. Humbling. We’re about to return to Sao Miguel and see what’s possible.

That’s the story, for now. Stay tuned.

I posted those words on Facebook exactly a year ago while surrounded by moving boxes in our Boston apartment. At the time they felt like hope expressed out loud. Reading them now, I’m struck by how little I understood about what Heather and I were really attempting. I thought we were moving to Portugal. We were actually testing whether it is possible to begin again.

If you had asked me a year ago whether moving to the Azores would work, I would have admitted that I didn’t know. Heather and I arrived carrying hope, confidence, and a great deal of preparation, but none of those things could answer the question that mattered most. We believed another life might be possible, yet belief is never the same as evidence, and the only thing capable of providing that evidence was time.

As we reach our first anniversary on São Miguel, I find myself thinking less about what has happened and more about what has been proven. This isn’t an anniversary marked by nostalgia or a catalogue of favorite places and memorable meals. Those moments certainly exist, and they have enriched our lives, but they are not the reason I know we made the right decision. The real proof emerged quietly through the routines of everyday life, where dreams eventually give way to ordinary Tuesdays and a place begins asking whether you are prepared to make it home.

Almost every major life change enjoys a honeymoon period. During those first weeks everything feels new, every road invites exploration, and even the smallest errands carry a sense of discovery. Shopping for groceries becomes an adventure, unfamiliar words become opportunities rather than obstacles, and each walk reveals another beautiful view that reminds you why you came.

Eventually, however, the extraordinary settles into the ordinary. The grocery shopping still has to be done. Bills arrive with dependable regularity, doctor’s appointments need to be scheduled, insurance policies require deciphering, and government offices ask for one more document than you thought you needed. Portuguese becomes less of a charming novelty and more of a language you genuinely want to understand because your life now depends upon it. There are moments of confusion, occasional frustrations, and days when progress feels slower than you hoped, yet those experiences gradually stop feeling like interruptions and become part of the rhythm of living here. That, I have come to believe, is where the real test begins. A vacation can tell you whether you enjoy a place. Only ordinary life can tell you whether you belong there.

Looking back, what surprises me most is that the strongest evidence in favor of our decision came from the moments that disappointed us rather than the moments that delighted us. We arrived believing we had found the house where we would begin the next chapter of our lives, only to watch that dream unravel through legal complications and circumstances beyond anyone’s control. For a while it felt as though we had lost more than a property because we had already begun imagining birthdays, dinners, conversations, and quiet evenings within those walls.

Disappointment has a way of clarifying priorities. As Heather and I worked through the practical decisions that followed, searching for another apartment and reorganizing our plans, I noticed something that I hadn’t expected. At no point did either of us begin discussing whether we should leave Portugal. We talked about where we would live, how we would adjust, and what came next, but returning to the life we had left behind simply never entered the conversation. Without realizing it, we had already crossed an invisible threshold. The question was no longer whether we could build a life here because we were already doing exactly that.

The months that followed brought the countless small challenges familiar to anyone who has begun again in another country. Residency paperwork eventually gave way to residence cards. We learned how the healthcare system worked, found new doctors, opened bank accounts, navigated insurance, and slowly replaced old routines with new ones. None of those accomplishments would make for dramatic storytelling on their own, yet together they formed the quiet architecture of a life. Homes are built from ordinary days far more than extraordinary ones.

Some of the greatest surprises had nothing to do with logistics. We expected extraordinary scenery because the island had already captured our imagination long before we moved here. We expected the ocean, the green hillsides, the changing weather, and the volcanic landscapes. What we never anticipated was how naturally community would begin taking shape around us.

We found ourselves recognizing familiar faces at neighborhood cafés and local markets. Conversations that once began with careful introductions gradually continued where they had left off the week before. We discovered that life here often moves at a pace that allows people to notice one another, and that simple difference changes far more than a daily schedule. It changes the way relationships grow.

Perhaps the greatest surprise of all was realizing that we no longer wanted to experience the Azores simply as grateful newcomers. Somewhere along the way our attention shifted from asking what this place could offer us to wondering what we might contribute in return.

That change shaped nearly everything that followed. My writing began to evolve almost without my noticing. What started as a way of recording our experiences gradually became an ongoing conversation about this remarkable place and the people who call it home. Photography stopped being about collecting beautiful images and became another way of paying closer attention. Stories emerged from conversations, local history, and chance encounters that I doubt I would ever have noticed had we remained visitors.

The same spirit found its way into Co.Arts Azores. Heather and I arrived carrying decades of experience in theatre, improvisation, and storytelling, although we never imagined that within our first year we would be inviting people together to create something new. Watching strangers become collaborators, hearing laughter fill a room, and seeing curiosity overcome hesitation has reminded us that creativity is one of the quickest ways people begin belonging to one another. Whatever Co.Arts Azores ultimately becomes, it already represents something larger than either of us could have planned on our own.

When I think about this first year, I realize that belonging rarely announces itself. There is no ceremony marking the moment when you stop being a visitor. Instead, it arrives quietly through accumulated experiences until one day you realize that the people around you have become part of the landscape of your life, just as you have become a small part of theirs.

That realization has changed the way I think about this journey. We came here hoping to build a different life, and during this first year the island gently tested that hope in ways neither of us could have anticipated. Some of those tests were joyful, others frustrating, and a few genuinely disappointing, yet each one asked the same essential question. Could we still imagine our future here once the novelty had faded and real life had taken its place?

Our answer never changed. The strongest proof that we made the right decision is not found in the beautiful photographs I have taken or the places we have explored. It lives in the difficult days, because those were the moments that revealed where our hearts had already settled. Every obstacle became another opportunity to ask whether we still wanted this life, and every answer quietly pointed in the same direction.

One year ago we arrived carrying plans. Today we carry commitments, and there is a profound difference between the two. Plans belong to people who are still asking whether something might happen. Commitments belong to people who already know. The first experiment is over. It worked. What lies ahead is no longer about discovering whether we belong here. It is about discovering what we can build because we do.

A year ago I ended that post with two words: Stay tuned. At the time I couldn’t know how the story would unfold. I only knew we were willing to take the first step. Twelve months later, I finally have the answer I couldn’t have written then. The experiment worked. The next chapter isn’t about wondering whether we made the right decision.

It’s about honoring it.

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"Fall Classic Finale, 10.23.93" — Rich Margittay's photograph of Joe Carter's legendary walk-off home run was later produced as this limited-edition lithograph. Rich's records indicate that both the original photograph and the lithograph are part of the collection of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown. It was the first piece he showed me, and it immediately suggested that I wasn't meeting someone who simply collected sports history. I was meeting someone who had quietly helped preserve it.

There are people who become part of history because they stand at the center of it. Then there are people who quietly preserve history because they happen to be standing nearby with a camera. I met one of those people on a 55-and-over softball team in Dearborn, Michigan.

His name was Rich Margittay, a retired Dearborn, Michigan police detective I had met in Detroit while playing softball. Somewhere between innings he casually mentioned that he had filmed the 1968 World Series in Detroit and the 1977 World Series between the Yankees and Dodgers in New York. Then he added something that made me stop. He hadn’t been there as a credentialed photographer. He had simply talked his way onto the field. Not once. Again and again.

Halfway through this essay you’ll find two short excerpts from Rich’s original Super 8 footage. Watch them before you read the ending.

At first I assumed I had misunderstood him. Surely no one wandered onto the field during multiple World Series games carrying an 8mm movie camera without someone eventually asking who they were. A few days later Rich invited me to his home. Walking through the front door felt less like entering a house than stepping into a private museum assembled over a lifetime of devotion to sports. Shelves overflowed with photographs, framed memorabilia, cabinets full of autographed baseballs, autographed bats and gloves, handwritten notes, carefully organized lists of games, tournaments, and championships he had attended, and boxes that hinted at stories still waiting to be uncovered.

Then he cued up a DVD transfer of his Super 8 film into the player. Within minutes I understood I wasn’t watching home movies. I was looking through a window that had been closed for nearly half a century.

There was Al Kaline moving through batting practice before Game Three of the 1968 World Series. Cardinals players laughed together while stretching. Pitchers warmed up. Rain delays became opportunities to wander through dugouts, clubhouses, and even the writers’ room, where rows of typewriters clattered away as reporters prepared tomorrow’s stories.

The footage from the 1977 World Series was even more astonishing. By then, Rich had told me, he had become even bolder in his obsession to be in the middle of the action during major sports events. Once again he somehow found himself on the field, this time at Yankee Stadium, during batting practice, camera in hand, at a time when almost nobody else carried one. The players noticed him almost immediately.

Thurman Munson.

Reggie Jackson.

Tommy Lasorda.

Yogi Berra.

Mickey Rivers.

Davey Lopes.

They weren’t posing for television cameras or performing for carefully choreographed media moments. They were simply filling the long hours before first pitch, talking, joking, taking batting practice, teasing one another, and occasionally acknowledging the young man with the camera as though he belonged there. The intimacy of the footage was unlike anything I had ever seen. It wasn’t about the games. It was about everything surrounding them.

The famous players became ordinary men waiting to play baseball. Watching those reels, I found myself thinking less about the World Series and more about the remarkable accident of their existence. Rich hadn’t set out to become an archivist. He simply kept showing up.

Archival Footage from the 1977 World Series

The two short films below were taken from Rich Margittay’s original Super 8 footage during batting practice before Games 1 and 2 of the 1977 World Series at Yankee Stadium.

Rich wasn’t a credentialed television cameraman. He simply found a way onto the field with an 8mm movie camera at a time when very few fans, or even media members, were carrying one. Because the camera itself was such a novelty, players and coaches often ignored it or played to it, creating moments of remarkable candor that simply wouldn’t exist today.

The first clip is the longer of the two and includes Thurman Munson, Reggie Jackson, Lou Piniella, Roy White, Mickey Rivers, Willie Randolph, Bucky Dent, Chris Chambliss, Paul Blair, and others moving casually through batting practice. It also contains a wonderfully relaxed conversation between Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda and Yankees slugger Cliff Johnson, along with appearances by Davey Lopes, Bill Russell, Rick Monday, Dusty Baker, Steve Yeager, and Don Sutton. These aren’t interviews arranged for television. They’re simply baseball people talking baseball before the biggest games of the year.

The second, shorter clip offers another glimpse into clubhouse life. Players like Fred “Chicken” Stanley take their turns in batting practice before Cliff Johnson arrives and the informal hierarchy of a championship team quietly reveals itself. It’s a small moment, but one that says a great deal about baseball culture at the time.

Rich attended Games 1 and 2. Ironically, he gave away his ticket for Game 3, the night Reggie Jackson hit his legendary three home runs, so what survives instead is something arguably even rarer: candid, behind-the-scenes moments that television cameras never captured.

As you watch these films during All-Star weekend, try to imagine them not simply as baseball footage, but as a time capsule. These players had no idea they were creating history. They were simply going about their work, unaware that one fan with a movie camera was quietly preserving a side of the game that would otherwise have been lost.

Over the years he did it again and again, quietly documenting World Series, Stanley Cup Finals, NBA championships, PGA tournaments, and countless other moments that eventually became part of American sports history. He wasn’t building a public profile or chasing recognition. He was preserving moments because he loved being there when they happened.

Rich then handed me several typed pages. At first they looked like little more than inventories. Dates. Opponents. Venues. Championships. The sort of lists someone keeps for themselves rather than anyone else. Then I slowed down.

1968 World Series. (On Field Movies, No Credentials)

1977 World Series. (On Field Movies, Without Credentials)

1984 World Series. (On Field Movies, No Credentials)

Joe Carter’s walk-off home run in 1993. (On Field Photos, No Credentials)

One page from Rich Margittay’s personal record of the sporting events he photographed over nearly four decades. ON THE FIELD WITH NO CREDENTIALS!!

That was just the baseball archive. There were pages more of events he filmed and/or photographed. With no credentials!

Stanley Cup Finals.

NBA Finals.

PGA Championships.

Tennis majors.

The final game at Tiger Stadium.

The first game at Comerica Park.

Gordie Howe.

Jack Nicklaus.

Tiger Woods.

Every line seemed to open another door into American sports history. I wasn’t holding a résumé. I was holding one man’s map of fifty years spent quietly following history wherever it happened to unfold.

I left his house convinced I wasn’t simply looking at old baseball footage and sports memorabilia, I was looking at the foundation of a documentary. One that would center around the 1977 footage. For weeks I immersed myself in the idea. Rich’s intimate Super 8 film would become the thread connecting present-day interviews with surviving players, archival World Series footage, and reflections on one of baseball’s most memorable Fall Classics. The proposal imagined an hour-long documentary exploring the game beyond the box score, revealing famous players as ordinary men sharing jokes, friendships, and quiet moments before taking the biggest stage in baseball.

I believed in it completely. Then reality arrived. Major League Baseball controlled archival rights. Interviews would have to be arranged. Legal questions needed answers. Funding had to be secured. Every practical hurdle appeared almost as quickly as the creative excitement had.

The documentary never found its footing. For a long time I assumed that meant the story had reached its end. Now I think it was simply waiting for another form. The older I become, the more I notice that stories rarely disappear. They migrate. A screenplay becomes a novel. A photograph becomes an essay. A memory becomes an audiobook. Perhaps an unfinished documentary eventually becomes a Substack essay.

Looking back now, I realize the real story was never the 1977 World Series. The story was Rich. History tends to celebrate the people standing in front of the cameras. Rich spent a lifetime quietly recording the moments surrounding them. He understood, whether he ever said so aloud or not, that memory survives because someone decides it is worth preserving.

The older I get, the more I appreciate people like that. They rarely think of themselves as historians. Yet without them, much of what we remember would quietly disappear. As I’ve been writing this week’s series of baseball essays during the All-Star break, I keep coming back to the same thought. Baseball has always belonged to more people than those whose names appear on the backs of uniforms.

It belongs to the poets who write about it. The photographers who preserve it. The collectors who protect it. The historians who research it. The storytellers who pass it along. And every once in a while, it belongs to a retired detective who simply kept showing up with a camera, leaving behind a glimpse of baseball that television never thought to capture.

I’m grateful he did.

Interviewing World Series MVP Paul Molitor after Toronto’s 1993 championship.

Gordie Howe / Jack Nicklaus signed piece.

Signed by Gordie Howe to Rich

This week I’ve written about forgotten rules, forgotten players, forgotten stories, and forgotten photographs. Perhaps that has been the thread running through all of these essays. Baseball remembers its heroes. It depends just as much on the people who remember everything else. Rich Margittay was one of those people. And because he kept showing up and talking himself onto the field, a little more of baseball’s past is still with us today.

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For a few days during Baseball’s All-Star break the standings become less important than the stories. We argue about who deserved to make the roster, watch the Home Run Derby, revisit impossible catches and unforgettable swings, and remember why the game captured our imagination in the first place.

I enjoy all of it. Yet as the All-Star break arrives each summer, I find myself thinking about another group of players whose names almost never appear in those conversations.

More than a century ago, long before television contracts, endorsement deals, and sold-out stadiums, traveling women’s teams crossed America by train, playing exhibition games against local men’s clubs in towns that often expected little more than an afternoon curiosity.

They were known as the Bloomer Girls. History has not been especially kind to them. Newspapers of the day often devoted more attention to their clothing than their baseball. Reporters wrote about novelty when they might have written about athletic skill. The women themselves appeared briefly, entertained a town for an afternoon, boarded the next train, and disappeared again, leaving behind little more than a box score, a newspaper clipping, or someone’s fading memory.

The deeper I looked into their history, the more I realized how much had gone missing. We know they traveled extraordinary distances. We know they played hundreds of games under difficult conditions. We know they faced skeptical crowds, uncertain pay, exhausting schedules, and promoters whose interests did not always align with their own.

What we rarely know is what happened between the games. Who comforted the youngest player after a difficult loss? Who protected the women when the road became dangerous? What conversations took place after the crowds drifted home and the uniforms were packed away for another journey? History rarely records those moments.

That is where fiction sometimes becomes useful. When I began writing American Stars: On the Road with the Bloomer Girls, I wasn’t trying to improve history or compete with it. I wanted to stand quietly beside the historical record and imagine the lives that existed just beyond its edges.

Every significant event in the novella grows from documented history. The traveling teams were real. The ballparks were real. The promoters, the towns, the newspaper accounts, and many of the circumstances surrounding them all have roots in the historical record. What fiction allowed me to do was restore interior life to people who often survived history only as passing references. It reminded me that history is usually constructed from what someone considered worth writing down. Life is much larger than that.

The All-Star Game celebrates the players whose accomplishments have been preserved, replayed, and passed from one generation to the next. It should. Yet I also think there is room during baseball’s midsummer celebration to remember some of the players whose contributions were quieter and whose stories became scattered across forgotten newspapers, local memories, and fading photographs.

The Bloomer Girls helped expand the game long before they were invited into its official history.That seems worth remembering. Their journey inspired American Stars: On the Road with the Bloomer Girls, now available as a Kindle ebook on Amazon. If this forgotten corner of baseball history interests you, I hope you’ll spend an evening with the story.

And if you do, I’d be grateful if you would consider leaving an honest review on Amazon. One of the themes I’ve been exploring in recent essays is how much independent publishing now depends on readers as much as writers. Reviews don’t simply help a book’s visibility within Amazon’s algorithms; they also help ensure that overlooked stories have a better chance of finding the people who might care about them.

In a small way, that feels fitting. The Bloomer Girls spent much of their lives playing before crowds that history largely forgot. Every reader who discovers their story today helps restore a little of what time allowed to fade. Link below 👇

American Stars: On the Road with the Bloomer Girls is a historical fiction novella set in Michigan in 1907, inspired by the real traveling Bloomer Girls baseball teams who barnstormed across America playing exhibition games against men’s clubs.

The story begins in a bar on the boundary line between two rival towns. A Sunday closure order, a crumpled notice, and a lingering question set the mystery in motion: what really happened when the Bloomer Girls came through?

Drawn from documented games, period newspapers, and the rough realities of early twentieth-century barnstorming baseball, the novella follows the arrival of a traveling women’s team whose presence unsettles a small town. What begins as a spectacle, women daring to play the national pastime, quickly becomes something more complicated, as gossip spreads, loyalties divide, and the truth of one Sunday afternoon game grows harder to pin down.

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