Around this time I was a guinea pig for my aunt, who was an elementary school English teacher. My aunt is a wonderful, ambitious woman who, in the course of her life, has been a teacher, a lawyer and a writer; in her later years, she adopted a child from Kazakhstan. She wasn’t a teacher for very long, but one of her lasting projects from that period was me: she taught me to read, at age three or four, and so much has followed from that, for good or ill.

By six I was reading the Hardy Boys and the Three Investigators (a long-forgotten series of mysteries in which three teenage sleuths were sponsored and abetted—-he supplied the chauffeur—-by Alfred Hitchcock); by eight, C.S. Lewis and Tolkien; by 10, Asimov and Heinlein, and so on. In third grade, the teacher set me aside with two equally bored girls, dubbed us the “advanced reading” group, and gave us fifth-grade texts. One was a story in which a pirate, pierced through his side with a saber, screamed “damn your eyes!” as he expired, which I found wonderfully adult.

This all apparently began with a set of flash cards that my aunt had devised. She had only just become a teacher and I believe the cards were some sort of hip educational theory that entailed rapid repetitions of vowel sounds, pictures and whole words. So a card would have a picture of a smirking cat on one side, and on the obverse, the phonetic and the actual word. As I was left on my own for most of the mornings in her trailer (these are now called “portable classrooms,” but in Virginia in ‘76, the kids called it a trailer), I just kept flipping through the cards. I recall little of this, but my mother has always credited it with doing some mojo on me that led me to become a gluttonous reader, and perhaps it sharpened my taste for solitude, which would both help and hinder me in the years to come.