American Childhood

My sweetest ambition was to see a drawing of mine on a newspaper’s front page: HAS ANYBODY SEEN THIS MAN? I didn’t care about reducing crime, any more than Sherlock Holmes did. I rather wished there were more crime, and closer by

had been driven into nonfiction against my wishes. I wanted to read fiction, but I had learned to be cautious about it.
“When you open a book,” the sentimental library posters said, “anything can happen.” This was so. A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds. They had been rusting out of everyone’s way for so long that they no longer worked. There was no way to distinguish the duds from the live mines except to throw yourself at them headlong, one by one.

They were saving to buy microscopes. In their bedrooms they fashioned plankton nets. But their hopes were even more vain than mine, for I was a child, and anything might happen; they were adults, living in Homewood. There was neither pond nor stream on the streetcar routes. The Homewood residents whom I knew had little money and little free time. The marble floor was beginning to chill me. It was not fair.