KISSING GAME

In a box of childhood mementos, I came across my Bluebird autograph book with the entry above.

The Cow Pasture wasn’t one, and there wasn’t a single desiccated cow pie to prove it ever had been, as far as Wolfy and I could discover. It was a rural patch of land in the middle of the city, belonging to the Farm Campus of the university. On the other side of a busy avenue, it was bounded by thistles that deterred all but the undeterrable, for whom scratches, like skinned knees and mosquito bites, were normal summer accoutrements. Beyond the thorniness was an expanse of brush that formed a low, dense canopy with tunnels between the trunks—a labyrinth just high enough to crawl through. Behind it were small poplared hills, which shimmered silver in summer, gold in the fall. On one especially grassy slope that we dubbed “Lovers’ Lane,” Wolfy and I devised a hit-and-miss kissing game dicier than Spin the Bottle. The rules were we had to roll down the hill together with our eyes shut and smooch whatever we bumped into—knee or elbow, stump or stone. From second through fifth grade, Wolfy was my boon companion. When I set out to write and illustrate my second children’s book, as I explain in my bio, “It started as a story about Wolfy’s and my escapades together but quickly became a fairy tale about an opinionated little princess who didn’t believe in fairy tales and her savvy little fool, who knew better.”

To read Sir Little Fool and the Skeptical Princess, scroll up to Categories in the right-hand panel and click on Children’s Stories.