When I was 13, I began visiting the library on my own and I discovered classical mythology.

It was the summer after 7^th grade, and the way I remember it I’d been allowed to ride alone for awhile. I’d been to the public library in Chula Vista with my mother and brothers. Something about that summer took me there once or more a week, alone and on my basketed bike, to acquire a stack of books.

I’m sure I checked out novels – that may have been the season when I plowed through Gone with the Wind just to accomplish the reading of a book with more than a thousand pages (I didn’t love it but I still recall parts of it) – but what took my heart were the tales of the Olympic pantheon.

I read various versions of most of the stories. I condescended to anyone who used the Latin names instead of the real ones. I even branched out from tales to some plays and that’s when I discovered how quickly a drama can be read, and how perfectly it plays in the mind (unless it’s a comedy – a comedy needs a stage).

I’m sure it was a formative and fortunate meeting. It led to my studying classical Greek in college and it helped build a wordsmith. I can still be seduced by those stories.

In love as well with libraries, I noticed others. I considered the Christian Science Reading Room and by the next summer I was flirting with the American Opinion Library, even after Dad told me they were John Birchers, even after he twisted his mouth at me so I couldn’t tell if he wanted to ban me from the place or go with me.

It was probably Dad who then steered me toward Ayn Rand. Oh but I loved The Fountainhead. Sure I read Atlas Shrugged too, and liked it, but like Tolkien’s hobbit books, the better was earlier. Rand wrote individualism so perfectly, so like a fairy tale or classic myth, that she put its idealism in perspective for me.