When was it? The summer before 4th grade? 5th grade? My local public library had a summer reading contest . . . You had to read a book, then meet with a librarian to discuss it – to prove you weren’t fibbing, I suppose — and then you’d get to move your name card one place forward on a big board posted on the wall. I think it was a picture of some kind of race track.

Anyway, this one year I really got into the contest and wound up one of the top readers in town, finishing 30- or was it 40-something books. If you made it to ten, the library would send a letter to your teacher in your upcoming grade. Looking back, I don’t remember having received any acknowledgement from whomever my teacher turned out to be, notwithstanding my prodigious number. But I think it may have been that summer that established in my own mind that reading was something I was very good at and one of the important things about who I was. My performance probably also had something to do with what became one of my mother’s main talking points about me for many years – that her son was “such a bookworm! Give him a book and you won’t hear a peep out of him for hours!”