If Children Are Not Permitted-not Taught-to Be

She Was A Natural Blonde, With Delicate Hands And Feet, And In Her Youthful Photographs One Saw A Girl With Mocking Eyes And A Tragic Smile, The Course Of Whose Life Would Conspire In Time To Transpose That Pair Of Adjectives.

Mr. Feld Was Right; Life Was Like Baseball, Filled With Loss And Error, With Bad Hops And Wild Pitches, A Game In Which Even Champions Lost Almost As Often As They Won, And Even The Best Hitters Were Put Out Seventy Percent Of The Time.

Drunk, Jane Spoke As Though She Were Nancy Drew. I Was A Fool For A Girl With A Dainty Lexicon.

When I First Decided I Wanted To Be A Writer, When I Was 10, 11 Years Old, The Books That I Loved Obviously And Openly Fit That Description: They Came With Maps And Glossaries And Timelines - Books Like Lord Of The Rings, Dune, The Chronicles Of Narnia. I Imagined That's What Being A Writer Was: You Invented A World, And You Did It In A Very Detailed Way, And You Told Stories That Were Set In That World.

One Knew, Of Course, That It Was Not The Red Cape Any More Than It Was The Boots, The Tights, The Trunks, Or The Trademark "s" That Gave Superman The Ability To Fly. That Ability Derived From The Effects Of The Rays Of Our Yellow Sun On Superman's Alien Anatomy, Which Had Evolved Under The Red Sun Of Krypton. And Yet You Had Only To Tie A Towel Around Your Shoulders To Feel The Strange Vibratory Pulse Of Flight Stirring In The Red Sun Of Your Heart.