I am 10 years old, and my mother and father and I are traveling through the prairie where we live. As always I am in the backseat surrounded by books. I have read my way across the prairie many times. On this day my mother will say something that will give me all I will ever need to become a writer. It will change my life.
The day is hot; the plush seat in the back of the car is prickly on my bare legs. We travel through towns with names like Rattlesnake, Sunrise, Spotted Horse. Heat waves rise off the land. We stop at a gas station to get cold drinks out of an ice-water tank. Nothing has seemed so cold since.
We walk out onto the prairie, my mother and I. She looks down at her dusty footprint in the dirt.
"You know, " she says. "Maybe someone once walked here. Or maybe no one ever has. Either way it's history."
There is a great silence that fills the air. I remember this. And if my life were a movie, the camera would pan to my mother, lifting her Dr. Pepper to her lips. It would pan over the endless rolling land. Then there would be a closeup of my face. My astonished face.
The camera would not see my thoughts, however. Oh no . . . I am not the center of the universe, after all. There have been children before me, thinking my thoughts, afraid of the dark. Maybe they dressed their dog in a blouse and sat him out in the front yard. And others will come after me.
I stare at my mother's footprint in the prairie dirt. I am connected. I am connected to those voices and faces from the past. I am connected to their words and their stories. I am connected to the present and all the people we pass in all the towns we travel through. My professor father made sure I never forgot about the connection of books and life. Every single day we acted out books and stories. I remember Peter Rabbit most vividly. My father would play a fierce Mr. McGregor, "scritch scratching" in the garden of the living room, and I'd play a frightened Peter Rabbit, running into the safety of the coat closet. Even today, when I open a coat closet, I get goose bumps on my arms, remembering how it was to be zipped into the fur of Peter Rabbit. After our story we'd have what my father called a "dialogue." He'd ask me, "Why are you so mischievous, Peter? Are you bored? Alienated?" Then we'd switch roles, and I'd be Mr. McGregor, and my father would play Peter Rabbit. This was when I first learned that rabbits sometimes scream when they're frightened. We would then have another dialogue. "Why are you so angry with this small thing, a rabbit?" he'd ask Mr. McGregor. "Are you bored? Alienated?"
And so it went. Books and stories became as real as -- perhaps more real than -- life itself. As an only child I had many imaginary friends, and my mother and father set places at the table for them. They encouraged me to have "dialogues" with them. They accepted my imagination.
My mother walked me to the library whenever I wished and walked me home again, her hand on my shoulder, guiding me up and down curbs and across streets as I read. When we arrived home I had read nearly all my books. The next day we would do this again. I have a strong memory of how those books felt in my hands, and what their titles were, and which ones I read over and over again. I still read this way.
My love affair with books and dialogue and character did not extend to school. My teachers gave us uninspired assignments: "Write a story for tomorrow. It must have a beginning, a middle and an end," said the teacher. "And it must be about your pets." I wrote my story on a 3x5 recipe card:
My cats have names and seem happy.
Often they play.
The End.
My teacher got what she asked for, a beginning, a middle and an end. I love this piece of bare-boned writing. It could have been written on the prairie in 1890 by Caleb Witting from Sarah, Plain and Tall. Or Anna, from the same story. But my teacher was not impressed. And she said a terrible thing to me:
