Beginning
Introductions are polite, so let’s start here.
(Don’t worry, this early bit won’t take very long. We’ll get to the more exotic fare soon enough, I promise).
I was playing in the backyard of a neighbor. I was maybe ten or eleven years old at the time.
My companion was a five-year-old who had started following me around whenever she saw me – I have no idea why my actual peers avoided having anything to do with me, whereas children much younger followed me around as if I were the Pied Piper, but that seemed to be the case, and I wasn’t really in a position to object. It kept me from getting too lonely, and later, it turned into some paid babysitting jobs, which meant I could buy more books than what I could purchase with just the tiny allowance my parents kept me on. When I was
