When I was 16, I got permission to write on the walls of my bedroom. The room’s closet and the adjoining bathroom created about four feet of entry hall that begged for decoration. After I made a short argument for self-expression my parents agreed to let me mark on the walls provided that I’d repaint before going to college.

And so I wrote. I think I rendered some of the little drawings I’d created for my binder – you know: heads and symbols etched in ballpoint ink on books covered in cloth or brown paper – but mostly I inscribed the words of writers I admired.

I quoted Vonnegut, especially from the end of Cat’s Cradle. I’m sure I put down some phrases from Ayn Rand, Robert Service, Piet Hein, Omar Khayyam.

And I’m sure it was good for me. I had been raised with such biblio-reverence that I was uncomfortable marking any book; I didn’t dog-ear pages or pen marginalia or underline or even highlight. I needed to make some mess and clean it up. I could use a do-and-destroy lesson.

I so enjoyed the year of wall-writing that I never felt the urge to do it again. I got tired of even the loveliest wittiest words. I learned then that none could be perfect enough to inscribe on my flesh or to worship.

Even the end of Great Gatsby, or the beginning of Fool’s Die, even my own best poem, lose luster with use.

I hope you all get a chance to write on walls. Or on the undersides of furniture. That works too, and may not need cleaning.

I used to have a little three-legged stool. It was made of a smooth light wood like fir or maple. On the underside of the seat, in pencil, I drew a princess. It wasn’t easy; the legs of the stool got in my arm’s way. My princess was dressed in a bell-shaped long skirt that looked like a bombe cake, festooned with scallops of ribbon cinched to the cloth with roses. I must have decorated that stool when I was around 6. I last saw the thing in Chula Vista, near the house door to the garage, around 1962. I flipped it over and smiled at its secret side.