Here I am with my mother, about 1950, I guess, in front of the Ohio farmhouse house where i spent my earliest years. The house had neither paint nor running water. I don't know what I'm pointing to, maybe the future.
By 1977, I had been a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines, lived and worked in the Micronesian nation of Palau, made popsicle sticks in Israel at Kibbutz Gonen, washed cucumbers ten hours a day at the CriCri Cucumber Factory on the Greek island of Crete, sung Beatles' songs in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and taught English in Tripoli, Libya. Here, I am back in the States relaxing on the lawn of the boarding school in western Massachusetts where I taught after that long, ten-year oddyssy. In three years from the time this picture was taken, i would enroll as a voice major at New England Conservatory. I wanted to be a classical singer. In this pic, I still seem to be obsessed with the future.
Sadly, I decided that what the world did not need was one more mediocre tenor. This is my first book, published in 1991, and written only to amuse my three-year-old son, (the same son. with whom I have now written Bonebag.) It never crossed my mind to publish Rotten Kids, but well, here we are.Too long a story to go into here, so I'll just say that sometimes we need a little luck in our lives. (Thank you Amy Ehrlich!) I'm both saddened and proud to say that the book was banned in Spokane, Washington: A mother was upset that the kids in the book were not being punished. Also, she suspected that there was Satanic writing in the book. People were crazy even back then.
Some thirty-five books later at our home in rural New Hampshire, an image that the toddler in the first picture could never have imagined. Life is full of surpises. The world is mysterious.