For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.

When the ground starts moving, all bets are off.

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their more casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.

I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking.

Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.