It may seem unlikely that a middle-aged woman would sprout an all-out obsession with a famous dead guitarist, leading to a love affair with a city some 2,000 miles away. But this “Austin thing” has been one of the most meaningful chapters of my six decades on the planet — and it ain’t over yet.

We live in a world that can be quick to glom onto surface-level information. Me, I prefer the stories that live below the surface, that take time to discover and fully understand.

“A dinner party, to me, is putting people around a table and feeding them and nourishing them and having great conversations and lingering over the table and connecting,” Peg Tomlinson-Poswall says. “Food is universal. It’s what connects all of us, no matter what country you go to, once you sit at the table.”

My fascination with cemeteries began when I was a child, when my father would take me to our local one in New Jersey to pay our respects to lost relatives. While he stood in thought over the grave of his father or brother, I’d wander.

I recall that as a young man I desperately tried to find a television in India’s lower Himalayas to watch one of the many Wimbledon finals in which Pete Sampras appeared — and eventually had to settle for a hotel with a black and white TV and a dubious antenna that, despite the manager swearing up and down would show Wimbledon if I wanted it to, in fact aired nothing but crackle.

The Wall Street Journal declared the briefcase dead in 2007. What happened?