How a Little Black Dog from Texas Helped Save My Life

Do you believe in magic?

I do. It’s out there, but we often overlook it.

Tonight, I ate beets because of a little black dog from Texas. There’s magic in this.

In the late spring of 2017, Samwise and I set out on a cross-country road trip. We left after a Saturday afternoon book event for Will’s Red Coat at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We spent that first night outside of Philadelphia. Over the next few days, we worked our way down the coast until we arrived in Savannah. We stayed for two nights because I wanted to visit Bonaventure Cemetery. Most tourists stop there because it was in the book and movie Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

I had a different reason. One hundred and fifty years earlier, John Muir walked from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico. It was in the wake of the Civil War. It was the first of his grand adventures. By the time he reached Savannah, he was out of money. He wrote to his family but had to wait for its arrival. Being broke, he could n…