My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Rapp, was also my neighbor. I remember being very homesick, but she was kind and gentle. She invited me down to her porch one day to help make Hawaiian flowers out of tissues in all different colors. It's amazing what a small thing like that can do to make a child feel special.

My home on Falcon Drive is where I jumped rope, skated with a key dangling from my neck, played Kick the Can outside until dark, and walked to the bookmobile on the corner. We walked home for lunch, and usually my mom would have bubbly-hot pot pies just out of the oven. Yum. I still love pot pies. Only the cheap ones—the expensive ones just don't taste as good.

I always had hobbies. I had a typewriter (I suppose it was actually a "toy" but it clicked and clacked and actually printed the words on paper." I wrote favorite words and rhymes on the cardboards that came inside my dad's newly laundered shirts. (Oops, apologies to my mom. She washed and ironed shirts then. The shirt cardboards came in a little later, when I was 13 or so.) But I colored and wrote on stacks of clean white paper, construction paper, anything I could find. I loved school supplies. I made my own Captain Kangaroo box filled with delicious things