Not the kind of lies that make the news. Not always the kind that end relationships, though I’m guilty of that too. What I’m talking about are the small, slow lies. The ones that look like promises when they leave your mouth and dissolve into nothing before you can take them back.

I’ll be there. I’ll do better. I’ll change.

You know the ones. Maybe you’ve said them. Maybe you even meant them. I meant every single one of mine and I broke them, anyway. Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just quietly, the way you let the phone ring one too many times until the other person gives and up stops calling.

This has been on my mind for the past couple of weeks because of a book. A book about a boy who doesn’t break his promise. A boy who keeps it through frozen mountains and violence and terror and exhaustion, who keeps it when any sane person would quit, who keeps it while some of the worst people I’ve ever encountered in any novel are hunting him down like an animal. And I’m sitting here, a grown man who has looked people he loved in the eye and said words he didn’t have the spine to back up.

The book is Mark Z. Danielewski’s Tom’s Crossing. It’s 1,232 pages long. I’m about 700 pages in, which means I’m barely past the halfway mark of a book that weighs as much as a small Chihuahua. I read it in bed. I read it at the kitchen table. I read it in the parking lot of the local Albertson’s with the engine off because I can’t put it down, which is something I haven’t said about a book in years.

The novel’s opening line sets the table: “Hard to figure how so much awful horror could’ve started out with just them two horses and not a one yet named…”

Two horses. That’s where it starts.

The story, at its simplest, is about a teenage boy named Kalin March. He’s made a promise to his best friend, Tom, to free two horses that are marked for slaughter. That’s the promise. Free the horses. It sounds like a children’s book when you say it out loud. Two kids, two horses, the mountains of Utah. You could tell this story in a pamphlet.

Except the family that owns those horses is hunting them. And I don’t mean they’re annoyed. I don’t mean they’ve called the sheriff and reported the theft. I mean this might be the most terrifying, relentless, unhinged family I’ve ever encountered in literature, and I’ve read Cormac McCarthy extensively. Kalin isn’t just keeping a promise. He’s keeping a promise while being chased through frozen mountains and ice and rain by people who would do anything to keep their own secret. A secret born in violence and lies.

Danielewski tells it in 1,232 pages.

And I keep thinking about why. Why this story needs that much space. Why this particular promise, between these particular people, requires a book that takes weeks to finish.

I think it’s because a promise kept at great cost can’t be told quickly. The length is the point. You have to feel the weight of it in your hands, in your days, in the way the book rearranges your life around it. You have to carry it the way Kalin carries the promise. You have to be tired of it before you understand it.

I finished another monolithic Western late last year, Lonesome Dove. If you haven’t read it, the short version is this: two old Texas Rangers drive cattle from South Texas to Montana. Along the way, Woodrow Call makes a promise to his best friend, and business partner, Augustus McCrae. The kind of promise you can only make once. One that can cost you everything to keep.

Call keeps it. He drags that promise from Montana back to South Texas. Thousands of miles. Alone. Through weather and country that would kill most men.

People along the way think he’s crazy. He doesn’t argue with them. He just keeps going. And when it’s finally done, when the promise has been kept, Call stands there and says to his friend, “I guess this’ll teach me to be more careful about what I promise people in the future.”

That line wrecked me. Because Call isn’t being careful. He was never going to be careful. He was always going to keep the promise.

The line is the only way a man like that can admit he loved someone without saying the word.

The promise in Tom’s Crossing and the promise in Lonesome Dove are the same. They’re both simple. Free the horses. Bring me home to Texas. A child could understand them. And both of them nearly destroy the people who keep them.

One is an old man who won’t say he loves his best friend. One is a boy who doesn’t need to. And I’m somewhere in between, sitting in a grocery store parking lot, knowing the words and saying none of them.

There’s a smarter version of this essay. One where I break down Danielewski’s prose for you. The Greek mythology threaded through a Western. The sentences that move like hooves on packed dirt before they split open into something that leaves you staring at the ceiling at two in the morning, shaking your head.

And all of that is true and worth talking about. He’s doing something in this book that I haven’t seen anyone do. He’s taken the simplest story, the oldest story, a boy keeping a promise, and he’s given it the space and the seriousness of an epic. He’s saying this small thing deserves twelve hundred pages of your attention. He’s saying you should have to work for it.

But I keep coming back to that promise.

I keep coming back to the question the book is really asking, which is the same question McMurtry asked, which is the same question that’s been sitting in my chest since I was old enough to make a promise I couldn’t keep: How far would you go?

And here’s what gets me. Kalin March isn’t a man. He’s a boy. A boy being chased through mountains by people who want to destroy him, and he doesn’t quit. A grown man with a truck and a rifle and decades of life behind him might talk himself out of it. Might weigh the cost. A boy just goes. Because he said he would. Because his friend asked him to.

Which makes the harder question underneath it even harder: Have you ever loved anyone enough to find out?

I think about my kids. I think about my granddaughter. I think about the promises I’ve made to them, spoken and unspoken.

I’ll be there. I’ll show up. I’ll be the kind of man you can count on.

Mostly, I have been. Mostly.

That word does a lot of heavy lifting in the life of a man who wants to believe he’s dependable. A man who’s mostly there when you need him.

Mostly means I was there for the big things. Mostly means I showed up when it was easy and sometimes when it wasn’t. Mostly means I kept the promises that had audiences and let some of the private ones dissolve.

Mostly is the word you use when you don’t want to say the rest of the sentence out loud.

Nobody writes a 1,232-page novel about a man who mostly kept his promises.

Nobody drags a body on a sign across Texas because they mostly said they would.

The thing about Kalin March, the thing about Woodrow Call, is that neither of them has a “mostly.” They have a promise, and they have their feet, and they have the distance between where they are and where they said they’d be. That’s it. The promise isn’t a feeling. It’s a direction. You walk toward it or you don’t.

I wonder sometimes if the reason I read books like this, if the reason I sat with Lonesome Dove for weeks and am now sitting with Tom’s Crossing for what will probably be a month, is because I’m trying to borrow something.

Like if I can carry the book far enough. Carry it through enough nights and waiting rooms and crowded parking lots and early mornings at the kitchen table. Maybe I’ll absorb some of whatever it is that makes a person capable of that kind of devotion. Maybe I’ll finish the last page and be different. Be someone who doesn’t forget, or ignore, what he said he’d do.

But I don’t think that’s how it works. I think the book knows that’s not how it works.

I think Danielewski knows that most of us are not Kalin March. Most of us, fully grown adults with cars and money and every advantage a boy in the mountains doesn’t have, are the people in the town who hear about what happened and shake our heads and say, I could never do that.

And we’re right. We couldn’t.

But we can read about a kid who could, and that has to count for something, even if I’m not sure exactly what.

Maybe it counts because it keeps the question alive. How far would you go? Maybe you don’t need to answer it. Maybe you just need to keep asking it.

There’s another question the book puts on you, one I haven’t been able to shake. It’s not just about whether you’d keep the promise. It’s about whether anyone has ever looked at you and believed you would. Whether anyone has ever loved you enough to lay that weight on you, to say, I trust you with the thing that matters most to me, and I believe you will carry it.

That’s what Tom does for Kalin. That’s what Gus does for Call.

The promise isn’t just an obligation. It’s an act of faith from the person asking. It says, I know who you are. I know what you’re made of. I’ve watched you, and I believe you’re the one who won’t quit.

I don’t know if anyone has ever looked at me that way.

I don’t know if I’ve given anyone reason to.

And maybe that’s the thing I’m most afraid of, reading this book. Not that I’d fail to keep the promise. But that no one would ever think to ask.

I’m on page 700-something. I’ve got 500 pages to go. The book sits on my nightstand and it’s the last thing I see before I turn the light off and the first thing I see when I open my eyes. I don’t know how it ends. I don’t know if Kalin frees the horses. I don’t know if the promise holds.

But I know I’m going to finish it. I’m going to carry this book the rest of the way, through whatever Danielewski has waiting in those last 500 pages, because I said I would. Because I picked it up, and I made a deal with the story: take me somewhere, and I’ll follow.

It’s a small promise. It’s the only kind I know how to keep right now. And I’m keeping it.

Let’s talk about the hat, because it’s important, at least to me. I’ve worn a baseball hat since I was fourteen years old. Not for any particularly good reason, like I’m covering up the rapid onset of male pattern baldness or I’ve decided to take up a sport on the backside of my middle-age years. I just feel most comfortable when I’m wearing one and my head is covered. Ask anyone who’s known me for any extended period of time, if you see me without a hat on it looks odd. I don’t know why I wear one. I started wearing it at a time in my life where I wanted to hide and part of me thinks that has continued for the past thirty-five years.

I’m forty-nine, I still wear one almost every day. Along with a faded UConn shirt or a solid-colored t-shirt and a pair of jeans, it’s become what my children a my “dad uniform.” The current 100% polyester, fitted iteration is a faded and stained Red Sox hat that has molded itself to the shape of my head the way only a good hat can. I’m unable to wear a hat that isn’t fitted due to the prodigious size of my noggin. Being that I have a large head, the one-size-fits-all hats with the strap in the back are woefully inadequate and leave my Shrek-sized cranium looking more ridiculous than normal. So I cycle through a never-ending stream of fitted hats, always in size 8, and mostly belonging to my beloved baseball team in Boston. It’s worked for me so far and I plan to continue. Eventually the hats will become soiled beyond any reasonable attempt to clean them and must be replaced. Much like the extinction events of Earth, this has happened five times and I fear we are well on our way to the sixth. But I will hold out as long as polite society will allow me.

Anyway, back to my hair. Now, I’m not a fancy man and I’ve always been ‌more form and function over style kind of person, so I’ve never voluntarily gone to a hairdresser or one of those hipster barbershops to have my hair cut. I have been forced a time or two, but I’ve never gone of my own accord. I find describing the style of haircut I want to be exhausting and unnecessary. And apparently, when being how I would like my hair cut, replying with, “Just like it is now...but shorter” isn’t as helpful, or as funny, as I think it is.

Like I said, I spend most of my life with my head covered, so I’m not looking for artistry, I’m looking to make sure the hat fits and my head doesn’t get overly sweaty in the oppressive Texas summer. So, I go to the Great Clips in Rowlett, Texas. The same one every time. A small, friendly Vietnamese woman always cuts my hair. Her name is Anna, or at least that’s what the receipt says. I don’t know if she chooses me or if it just works out that way, but it’s been long enough now that I’d feel strange if someone else called my name to a chair. I think she’d feel strange too, though I can’t be sure about that. We’ve never talked about it. We’ve never really talked about anything. I may be reading too much into our monthly arrangement.

I take the hat off when I sit down in her chair. It’s one of the few places that I do outside of the house. I place it in my lap as she places some stretchy ribbon paper around my neck and swings a nylon barber cape over me

I like the routine of this whole experience. I enjoy sitting in the waiting area and not talking to anyone. A row of plastic chairs, everyone looking at their phones, me writing furiously in my pocket notebook, no one talking to or expecting anything from me. This is about as close as I’m comfortable getting to other members of humanity. I enjoy the rhythm of routine. I enjoy the silence. I even enjoy the 80s and 90s music that is always playing at this location.

When Anna is ready, her tools are lined up on a small, clean towel in front of me, everything sanitized and in its place, like a careful still life arranged at the start of each day. It makes me feel good to see them. There’s something quietly sacred about a person who takes the time to lay things out right before they touch you. It tells you they care about what they’re doing, even if it’s the thirtieth haircut of the week, even if you’re just another man in a plastic smock who has a chronic inability to explain what he wants. There’s a bit of a language barrier between us, and I appreciate that too. She asks me questions in a sometimes thick accent and I answer yes to pretty much everything. The one exception is the eyebrows. They are the one part of hair on my head that has resisted the graying process, so far, and they are a prominent feature of my face. (I blame my parents.) They always offer to trim them, and I always decline. I handle that myself, ever since one unfortunate mishap a decade ago where I was forced to spend a month looking like a charter member of the Manson family. Some of life’s lessons only need to be learned once.

I don’t need to make conversation. I don’t need to perform. And maybe that’s what I appreciate most about Anna. There are people in your life you talk to every day and never really know, and there are people you barely talk to at all who somehow know exactly what you need. Anna and I have built something in that second category. It’s not friendship exactly. It’s not nothing either. I am her customer and that is good enough for me.

Thanks to a printed slip of paper when I check in she knows exactly how I like it cut without having to ask questions that I can’t answer. She knows I’m going to say yes to everything. She knows I’m on the tall side and that the chair won’t go low enough for her to clip my hair comfortably. I’m six foot two with a thirty inch inseam, which means I’m mostly torso, and I’m often forced to slouch in the chair so she can reach the top of my head. (Again, I blame my parents.) I can always tell when it’s time because she pumps the pedal to lower the chair over and over to no effect. So I slide down and fold myself into something more manageable, and she carries on without a word. We’ve done this enough times that it’s choreography now. A little dance we do every month that neither of us has to think about.

The buzz of the clippers soothes and lulls me, and for a few minutes the world gets small and manageable and fine. Even if the sideburns routinely come out a bit uneven, I’m grateful for her hands and her attention. She always does good work.

Today when I was paying I looked at down at the receipt. It said Senior Haircut, eighteen dollars.

I turned forty-nine years old three weeks ago.

Forty-nine is a strange age. You’re not old enough for anyone to feel sorry for you and not young enough for anyone to give you the benefit of the doubt. You’re just there, on the downslope of the middle of your life, watching things shift in ways that are too slow to fight and too fast to ignore. The gray came on gradually and then all at once, the way these things do. One year I had a few silver hairs at the temples and the next year I looked like a different person. My kids didn’t say anything about it. My granddaughter Clara doesn’t know me any differently. But I notice it every morning when I look in the mirror before I put the hat on. That’s the thing about getting older. The people who love you stop seeing it long before you do.

My knees ache when I stand up from low chairs. I make sounds now when I bend over to tie my shoes. One time I sneezed too hard and spent a week laying on the kitchen floor, my back unable to bend without exceptional agony. I’ve started getting junk mail from AARP, which feels like a threat. The world has started treating me like a certain kind of man, the kind who gets called sir by teenagers and offered help with bags at the grocery store. I’m not that man yet. Or maybe I am and I just haven’t caught up to it.

Now I have questions. Not complaints, never complaints. Questions. Did Anna look at me and think, that man is surely sixty-five? Was it the gray? There’s a lot of it now, and it’s the one thing the hat can’t hide. Or did she just decide to knock two dollars off because she’s kind and I’m a regular and that’s what you do for the man who shows up every month and says yes to almost everything you ask?

I don’t know. I can’t ask her. I wouldn’t ask her. And honestly, I’d rather not know. I’d rather sit with the mystery of it. Either I look old enough to qualify for a senior discount at forty-nine, which is humbling in a way that only a receipt can be, or a woman who cuts my hair did me a small and quiet kindness for no reason at all. Which is something else entirely.

Both of those things are worth more than two dollars.

There are so few places left where you can sit with another person and not have to explain yourself. Where the silence between you isn’t awkward but earned. Anna’s chair is one of those places for me. I show up, I take off my hat, I sit down, and for fifteen minutes someone takes care of me without asking why I need it. That’s a rare thing in this world. That’s a rare thing at any age.

I tipped her fifteen on the eighteen-dollar cut. Because she lined up her tools on that towel. Because she took care of it. Because whatever she saw when she looked at me today, whether it was an old man or a regular or just a tall guy who says yes to everything, she treated me the same way she always does. I put the hat back on the moment she finished, the way I always do, and walked out into the parking lot feeling like myself again.

I’ll be back in a month. I’ll sit in the waiting area and not talk to anyone, scribbling away in a small journal. I’ll say yes to almost everything she asks me.

And if she gives me the senior discount again, I’ll take it

.

I also paint, mostly still lifes and landscapes in oil. I try to catch a feeling while it’s still fresh, even if it’s messy.

This space is where I'll work things out. I haven’t always been good at saying what I mean or showing how I feel. Painting helps. Writing helps more.

I’m doing this for my children and my granddaughter, Clara. I want them to know who I really am, not just the good and bad things I've done, but what I thought about, what I cared about, and how I saw the world.

You’ll find essays about meaning, memory, grief, and art. You’ll see still photos and time-lapse videos of my paintings, as well as the stories behind the objects I paint. I also write fiction, but that lives somewhere else. This space is personal, occasionally serious, but frequently absurd.

If anything here speaks to you, I’m glad.

— George