In Willow, by the inarguable providence of the state, he had daily escaped his house to attend the schools, whose grades up to junior high were taught almost entirely by motherly, mildly challenging women, and to walk the sidewalks with the twittering, teasing pack of girls, who could tell (not just Ginger Bitting but Barbara Emerich, with her cornsilk braids and one gray front tooth which showed when she smiled, and lithe, dark, grave-eyed Grace Bickta) that he adored them. Little Owen was malleable, gullible. He believed everything he was told and took comfort, abnormally much, from the town’s presiding public presences—the schoolteachers, and the highway crew, who from their tarry truck threw down cinders in winter and smoking gravel in the summer, and the three town cops, one short, one fat, and one with a rumored drinking problem. He took comfort from the little old lady, her glasses on a cord around her goitrous neck, who accepted their monthly electric bill at her barred window in Borough Hall, and the mailman, Mr. Bingham, who with the heroism of the well-publicized postal-service slogan heroically plodded his way up and down Mifflin Avenue twice a day, leaning at an angle away from the weight of his leather pouch, in which Mickey Mouse comic books and secret decoding rings and signed photographs of movie stars would sometimes come to Owen. If his diffuse childhood happiness could be distilled into one moment, it would be the day of a snowstorm, in the vicinity of Christmas—mid-afternoon, the outdoors already darkened under the cloud cover, tinsel and dried needles falling off the holiday evergreen in the front parlor onto the miniature landscape below, which he and his mother had concocted: cotton and flakes of Lux for snow, toothpicks stuck into bits of green-painted sponge for trees, and for habitations fragile store-bought papier-mâché houses gathered around the speckled mirror of a pond. Around the oval three-rail track ran his little blue Lionel train with its obedient speed shifts and translucent smell of lubricating oil. Suddenly—a noise that electrified Owen—the clacking letter slot announced that Mr. Bingham had trudged through the blizzard and, for the second time that day, delivered the mail. That mailmen walked and trolley cars clanged through the storm seemed to confirm the Hollywood, comic-strip version of American reality: we were as safe, and as lovingly regarded from on high, as the tiny, unaging figures in a shaken snow globe.