When I was 9 years old I skipped a grade. Which one, I’m always asked, and I don’t have a one-syllable answer. Part of third and part of fourth was the fact of the matter.

Skipping a grade was then not uncommon. It didn’t happen as often as tonsillectomies, but we all knew somebody who finished high school at 16 or 17. In my case, I was one of the oldest in my original class (January birthday), and I wasn’t small for my age, so my parents didn’t resist the suggestion to change my California placement from third grade to fourth.

There’d been buzzes about moving me up before we left New York, and the schools in California seemed a little behind what we’d been doing in the East, so I wasn’t in Miss Daniels’s third grade class long before they started pulling me out and giving me tests in the principal’s office. I didn’t spend enough time in class to make any friends I remember.

Then the holidays came. The process stalled. Sometime shortly after the new year began I was moved into my new class. They were well into multiplication. I think the class was on sixes when I joined them and suddenly I was memorizing multiplication tables like mad. It was my first experience with academic pressure.

I took on a table a night. I soldiered through and caught up with the class by the time they were doing tens. For years after I was slow, insecure and appreciative about my sevens, eights and nines.

I started to make friends in that class. I assembled my form of social life. When there was a suggestion in junior high that maybe I complete the rest of school on an accelerated basis, my parents dug their heels in and flatly refused.