I'm not sure how many times I've toured the childhood home of Thomas Wolfe in Asheville, North Carolina, but my most memorable visit to the rambling old boarding house, called, oddly enough, Old Kentucky Home, is a time when I could not enter it, could not even see inside through a porch window, though, as memory serves, the house should have been open for tours on the afternoon I arrived in the fall of '95 with a dark-haired lady friend (yes, I know, an old-fashioned term, "lady friend," that is, not "dark-haired," but one that best fits, or so it seemed then and still does now-also the title of a great song by the Byrds that you might want to seek out, really). She'd never seen the house, and so we were both disappointed, and a little frustrated, at not being able to enter, plus it was beginning to turn cold, and I'd harbored the hope that it might be warmer inside, though old rambling houses with 90-foot ceilings don't always deliver on heat. I'm sure Thomas [...]