For a long time I puzzled over how I managed to go from a hopeless screw-up in school to a hardworking, disciplined writer as an adult. After considering it for 50 years or so, I came to the realization that I had been a very hardworking little girl. In fact I was a workaholic, striving, in my 4-year-old way, to decipher the mysteries of the universe and the meaning of life. What was real? What was illusory?
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, it seemed as if nothing was real, that sunlight and houses and stop signs were pictures painted on a curtain. Behind the curtain was a black hole — nothingness. We kids weren’t supposed to know about the nothingness. Late at night, when we were asleep, the grown-ups touched up or repaired any wrinkles or tears in the curtain so that we wouldn’t suspect what lay behind the seamless surface. Even my consciousness, my essential being, might be part of the illusion. I lay in the dark, prickling with panic, praying for daylight and the sounds of activity and life to dispel the terrifying specter of nonexistence.
Then, in the middle of wrestling with these dilemmas — I admit I wasn’t making much progress — something terrible happened.
My parents sent me to kindergarten.
Kindergarten came as a rude interruption to my existential preoccupations. What did finger…
