Chapter 1: My Journey Starts Here

Writing? Who Me?

I think very few kids decide at an early age to be writers. I didn't.

There are the rare child prodigies who sit down at a piano at age two and start playing Mozart. But how many times have you heard about a kid who grabs a computer keyword and pounds out "War and Peace?"

No -- I was just happy being  -- as comedian/actor Robert Klein so brillantly evoked in his album, "Child of the Fifties" -- a child of the Fifties and Sixties. When the highlight of your day was watching "Superman" on a 19-inch, black and white TV and begging your mother to tie a dish towel around your neck so you and your brother could play "Superman" in the backyard.

Thinking back, probably the earliest precursor to my love of writing was my love of reading. Starting at an early age with the "Golden Books" that taught me the "A,B,Cs," reading books was like taking a magic carpet ride to the past, present or future, where knowledge, adventure, mysteries and wisdom were waiting to be discovered.

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Me, right, Mom and brother Ron

While my family was of modest means, in a typical, middle-class, post-World War II neighborhood, they found a way to indulge my love of reading. The local Piggy Wiggly supermarket ran a promotion offering "The Golden Book Encyclopedia of Natural Science." Each week you could get a new volume, and I couldn't wait for my mother to go shopping and bring it home. Dad got me a subscription to "National Geographic" and we had a set of World Book encyclopedias as well.

While I had stirrings of a desire to write something myself, the tidal forces that reading unleashed were pulling me in other directions. I was fascinated by science, and really thought that would be my life's calling.

It started, like it does with so many kids, with dinosaurs. Even in the pre-Jurassic Park days, who isn't awed by the thought of these giant reptiles roaming the land. Where we lived in Texas was once covered by an ocean millions of years ago, so when Dad took us fishing, I looked for fossils along the lakeshore. Paleontology seemed definitely in my future.

Fossil hunting created a new interest -- rock collecting. Soon our garage housed boxes of rocks of all
descriptions. Geologist had a nice ring to it. Then one Christmas I got a microscope, exposing the wonders of all things small. You wouldn't believe what lives in one drop of pond water, or a drop of your own blood. Biology was calling.

And so it went. After getting a telescope I couldn't stop looking at the Heavens; my brother and I spent summers chasing and collecting bugs, amassing a collection that some college students even asked to borrow for their studies; a chemistry set turned into a full-fledged lab in our storage shed. I even coerced my parents into a subscription for "Science Digest."

While my interest in science never changed, I slowly realized doing real science involves infinite patience, exacting methods, often resulting in endless tedium and repetition. Not to mention the one area that didn't come naturally: Math. So over time, science was relegated to a hobby, not a profession. Pretty much what my "right brain" knew along -- I just wasn't paying attention.

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