So it was that when I entered kindergarten, I switched classes on the second day. I was looking for more than I found on the first day, in my assigned room. I told my mother about it and she taught me the meaning of “absent.” Even after I was returned to my proper teacher I didn’t accept the routine. When rest time came, and we were all expected to take to our mats, I remember looking around – so many of us, not tired, and just one or two in charge, dictating stillness – and I began my school-long question of: why? Why were we resting, when we so outnumbered the teacher? Not only was I always surprised that the authority figure commanded obedience; I was struck at how few even asked the question.

I kept asking. Confronting. I dropped out of Sunday School at 8 when the teachers all stammered and refused to address my “But who created God?” I took on racism and ecology in junior high, proclaiming with such passion that I invited peer sarcasm then and self-mockery later. But the thing that was most remarkable about me was my total inability to subordinate my opinion to anyone else’s.

I couldn’t act either. Unless I played myself. I lacked what the drama teacher called negative capability. I was so good at debate that most said I should be a lawyer, but they were all wrong – I never could have argued well for a position I didn’t own.

Meanwhile I was raising myself. I ran a kind of home school for me, to supplement whatever institution I attended. So I encouraged me to read the Greek mythology I liked, in junior high. Although I understood I was just skating when I reread an old favorite like the biography of Clara Barton, for the tenth time, while snacking on something, I also knew my time with Zeus and Athena was well-spent. I was rather pleased with myself for riding my bike to the library every week, and checking out a dozen books that I’d finish before the next trip.

I thought a clubhouse was a necessary experience for any growing kid, so I found an old barn at the edge of the big estate that abutted our new-built neighborhood, and I talked my neighbors and brother into cleaning it and fixing it up into our place. When I was a junior in high school, my friend Norah and I agreed that no childhood would be complete without running away from home. Even though we were neither unhappy with our parents, one rainy afternoon we made a break for the adjacent college town and holed up with our friend Meg’s older brother until discovered, three hours later, when my mother called Meg’s mother and Meg forgot to lie for us.

We were punished for that one. Corny as it sounds, Norah’s parents blamed me as a bad influence on her, and my parents said she was corrupting me. Our telephone conversations were limited for a time.

But Norah and I were incorrigible. If we had a mantra, it was “No childhood would be complete without…” and we continued our soft excursions into eccentricity. We shoplifted just to do it, and only got caught once returning the items we’d taken (we had no need for them – we were anti-materialistic intellectuals). We rose at 3 the first morning of our senior year, so we could walk the 15 miles from Norah’s house to our school. Just because.