When I was about nine years old, something happened that is very important because it marks the birth of my interest in writing.  It is, I believe, proof that quite ordinary events can have an immense impact on our lives.

I was born in South Africa to American parents who lived for eighteen years in the suburbs of Capetown, with only two visits "home" to the States before they returned to stay – one when I was eighteen months old and another in when I was about ten.  (The outbreak of World War II made trans-Atlantic travel difficult and dangerous for many of the intervening years.)  I was too young to remember the first trip, and the following episode probably occurred as we were planning the second trip in 1946.

My imagination must have been filled to overflowing.  My parents' distant home was the land of exotic candy bars, comic books, and movies, all of which were rare treats in South Africa, even though, as Americans, we were "rich."  I even went to a private British preparatory school for boys, with firm discipline (including an occasional caning) and superb academics.  But I digress.  Those matters are for some other memoir.

One day in our house in Rondebosch, a suburb of Capetown and sort of "around the mountain" from the city, my mother was sitting at our manual (of course) Royal typewriter, composing a paper.  It was, I was told later, a report on American music for a women's club to which she belonged.  I asked her what she was doing.

"I'm writing a story," she said, probably because explaining what a "report" was did not seem like something getting into with a nine-year-old.

"Can I write a story too?" I asked.

She said that I could if I wanted and probably expected the matter to rest there, understandably mistaking an earnest question for an idle one.  She did not and could not have anticipated the floodgates she opened, and she was startled to learn from me that I intended to use the typewriter, which I had never laid a hand on before.

Although I was not exactly friendless, I was a rather solitary child who could, even in the midst of other activities, create fantastical adventures in my head.  Some kids have an imaginary friend; I had the cast of characters for a constantly changing five-act drama, in which, of course, I was always the hero.  Suddenly, an unexpected doorway had opened – I could give those fantasies that drifted through my brain a sort of reality by writing them down.  They existed in my mind as words anyway, but until then nobody had told me about the possibility of writing them down.

Of course, I was aware that other people wrote stories.  Although my mother never finished high school and my father's higher education had consisted of attending Wharton business school in Philadelphia at night, books had a prominent place in our household.  I learned how to read children's books by myself before I had even started school.  In fact, one of my mother's favorite stories about me concerned how the teacher in Sub A (the South African equivalent of the first grade) caught me reading.  I had gotten off by myself, quietly reading aloud from a Sub B (second grade) book.  The teacher approached warily and asked if I was reading the book.  I said that I was, and she thought that, as many kids that age do, I was pretending to read without actually knowing what the words were.  She was stunned to discover that the little American kid with the big ears actually was reading the words – in a book designed for the next grade.  (As a consequence, I skipped the next grade and had the sometimes inconvenient distinction of being the smallest and youngest boy in my class throughout most of my schooling.)

I never understood what the fuss was about.  Neither then nor in later years did I ever think of myself as a genius or prodigy.  I am not.  It was quite simple:  Words had always been my friends; they often presented a challenge but never a threat.  And many years later, I read something by a poet that described how I have always felt about words.  When asked why he was a poet, he said, "I like to hang around words and listen to them talking to each other."  To many people, this sounds loony; to me, it makes perfect sense.

Anyway, let's return to the house in Rondebosch.  When my mother's report was done, the Royal typewriter was placed on the floor, and I was allowed to start writing.  Obviously, it was going to be an adventure story.  Obviously, the hero would be a boy about nine years old.  Obviously, it would take place in America.  And obviously, nobody, including my parents, was to read what I was doing until it was all done.

I typed with one finger.  It took considerable pressure on those old typewriters to hit the key hard enough that the letter keys hit the paper, but I persevered.  Letters appeared on the paper, formed into words and then sentences, and a story – for all its faults – took form.  A page?  Two pages?  Be real.  We're not talking about a momentary whim here.  We're talking about unleashing the imagination. about an epiphany that says, "I can give my thoughts visible form."  Yes, I could handwrite, but handwriting didn't look like the thoughts in a book.  Typing looked like something destined to be published (remember, computers were in the distant future).  This was magic.

My parents were amazed that I kept at it for days.  I suppose that I even surprised myself.  None of us knew then what I was to learn later – that I have an addictive and obsessive personality; when I find something I like, I go at it whole hog.  And this was to be a very big adventure, not something that could be told in a few pages.  (Meek and introverted in outer demeanor, I could be inwardly quite grandiose.)

Although I clearly remember what prompted me to begin, I do not recall why I decided to stop.  My open-ended adventure could no doubt have gone on at epic lengths, but it turned out to be somewhere between 25 and 30 single-spaced pages (either a very long short story or a short novella), comprising several chapters.  My mother later transcribed it in neater form, double-spaced with fewer strikeovers and smudged erasures (there was no white-out in those  days) but otherwise exactly as I had written it.

Both manuscripts were lost, most likely in our move back to the States in 1949.  In what was to become a habit, I put it out of my mind very soon after it was completed, so when I went back to look for it in my parents' old shipping trunks that came to be used for storage, it was not to be found.  I'm sure that, in my teens, I would never have shown "The Adventures of Dickie Blake" (Good grief! To this day the title embarrasses me) to anyone, but I am saddened that I no longer possess this symbol of where it all started.  From the day I sat down on the floor with that old typewriter, I have always looked upon writing as something to be enjoyed – a challenge but never a chore.  Writing well is work, but only in the sense that designing a beautiful building is work to an architect or putting together an attractive and useful piece of furniture is work to a carpenter.  I knew from the beginning that there was no point in doing it if I wasn't going to do the best I could.  I also knew that what I produced should be useful or beautiful or interesting or have all of these qualities.  Nontheless, my own joy with the process itself was still enough reason for doing it.  During this process, I am my own critic, conducting a silent dialogue of thousands of words for every hundred I write.  Indeed, my inner voice is telling me that I am digressing too far into the "philosophy" of writing and should return to, and close, this reminiscence.

Oddly enough, though I began with fiction, it did not turn out to be my forté.  I never found my voice in writing short stories or novels – or, more accurately, my voice was too strong because all my characters spoke like me.  My imagination is much more constrained than it was in my early youth; thus, instead of externalizing what I imagine, writing has become my tool for externalizing what I think and, sometimes, what I feel.  Sometimes I wish I could take a story and run with it as readily as I can take an idea and make an essay out of it.  Then I think of all the unfortunate people who have never felt the joy of writing at all, and I know that I am blessed.

I know that, on that day long ago when I asked if I could write a story too, the muses nodded and said, "Why not give the little guy a shot at it?"  It's what people call a moment of grace.  I grasped it eagerly with both hands and never let go.

But I still type with only one finger.