About the Author

I was born in 1942, which makes me an old geezer. When I’m feeling mellow, I’m a harmless old codger. When I’m pissed off, I turn into an angry old curmudgeon. And when I’m at a party with friends and the wine’s flowing, I’m an amusing old coot. I’ve been an editor, actor, poet, and singer (sounds like that sappy Frank Sinatra song), and right now I write fiction. I live with my wife Patsy, an artist and gallery director, in New York City, and we spend part of our time in Peterborough, New Hampshire. We have no children (by choice), but we’re on our third pair of Siamese cats. As is their nature, they own us rather than the other way around.

I have a full brother who lives in an ashram in India practicing Transcendental Meditation and cultivating his garden, a half-brother who has published several books of poetry and currently teaches literature at Boston University, another half-brother who became a financial expert and moved to Texas, and a step-sister out in Big Timber, Montana. I graduated from Phillips Andover Academy and Yale University, got drafted, and spent two years wasting the tax-payers’ money on an Army base in West Germany. My acting career dried up some years ago, when I got tired of the frequent rejections that come with the profession, but I’ve kept up my membership in Actors Equity Association, the Screen Actors Guild, and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, simply because I believe in unions. In keeping with that belief, I vote Democratic, although nowadays there seems to be little difference between the Donkeys and the Elephants, since both parties are in thrall to Big Money interests.

I like to cook, and from time to time I’ll stir a favorite recipe into my blog. I speak slightly rusty French and Italian, and know a bit of Spanish, German, Dutch, and Latin (to anyone who says it’s a dead language, I say, “Futue te ipsum.”). Along with cats, I like horses. Dogs, not as much; I’m afraid of them. I’m fascinated by bats, those swift, darting evening hunters who eat pesky bugs like mosquitoes, and I even have a baseball cap with a bat logo, which Patsy and I got in return for a contribution to a group trying to preserve bat habitat and find a cure for the white-nose disease that has decimated the species. My bat cap amuses me, because B. A. T. are the initials of my legal name, which is Boylston Adams Tompkins. But you can call me Toby.