which offered a deliciously abstract, vague prospect to visualize, something you could think about but not see. Lessons all day, mostly involving letters, phonics; I loved the phrase “consonant blend” and liked to say it to myself. White chalk dust, foggy clouds of it, when the erasers are taken outside and beaten out. Milk money, and the worn white marble stairs going up, up into Peabody School to the library, when we’re taken there for a story, lined up according to our height. I am the tallest boy in first grade, but I don’t feel large. I am a very careful boy. I want to do well and am aware of certain dangers. Take my Dick and Jane book, that reader in which little bouquets of short declarative sentences so quickly replace the new magic of deciphering the code with the boring actuality of what the symbols represent: “See Puff eat.” We are each assigned a copy of the book, which we keep in our desks and are sometimes allowed to take home. I look ahead, curious about what else might appear on the stiff, strange-smelling pages, and right in the middle of my book is a horror: a starburst of mold, somebody’s old—jelly sandwich maybe?—smashed right between father (in his brown fedora, just like my father’s) and Dick and Spot. Not cool and beautiful like my buried bread-mold garden but too vivid, fierce. I am scared my teacher will think I’ve done this, violated the book; I’m responsible for it, after all, and I love my book even if it is weirdly boring and we read it so slowly, as if we are savoring something as insubstantial as a slice of that airy bread. I want to hide it, but the smell is so disgusting I have to tell her, and she doesn’t blame me at all.