As one does, I did a lot of moronic pretending when I was in grad school. I lied about what I knew (because if you pretend to read Heidegger, then you always have to pretend to have read Heidegger), and I lied about what I liked (e.g. whiskey, cats, and Bob Dylan’s Christmas album). When it was easy or self-serving, I sometimes told the truth, including once at a dinner party when I said that my favorite novel was The Great Gatsby.

The host — a lovely intellectual titan who kept a framed letter from Heidegger — was semi-listening, and I was desperate to be not-stupid. I made a quick calculation, figuring that my honest answer was innocuous and transcendent enough to escape any prodding. I responded, clearing one conversational hurdle and preparing my brain-legs for the next. Someone quipped about goony high school teachers ruining Gatsby and the discussion lurched elsewhere before I could try to explain why I loved the book. Equally grateful and slighted, I sipped some whiskey (barf) to celebrate the preservation of my 22-year-old intellectual persona.

Fast forward four years later, and I’m the goony high school teacher ruining The Great Gatsby for my juniors. I think that they’ve been lapping up Fitzgerald’s airy descriptions and delighting in Nick’s creepy-ish search for significance, and in my estimation, they’re about to fall to their cool denim knees upon reading the startlingly perfect last page with the classroom lights off and the windows open. As soon as my favorite student finishes reading aloud to us, she huffs, “Man, everyone in this book was such an asshole.” My face must look somewhat punched, because she backpedals with swift sincerity: “Sorry, Ms. D. I know you love this book, but…”

Again, with a new group of students, the space doesn’t open up for me to tease out my Gatsby love, because now we’re arguing about whether characters should be likeable if the reader's going to learn from them, and the way my students lean forward makes me realize that I don’t have to answer for the book yet — as long as I can help make this kind of discussion happen. After all, reading asks you to juggle what’s going on inside of you with what’s out there in the world, especially as you grow old and visit beautiful countries and do crazy stuff like become someone’s mom.

As I write this, I’m finishing my sixth year of teaching. I don’t teach Gatsby these days —too busy writing “persuasive” commercials for raw onions with 8th graders — but I’m still learning from it. Now, it meets me in a place where the green light switches from gorgeously abstract to kind of terrifying. Over and over, Gatsby demands that I stay alive to how time passes over my changing self, and I think that such aliveness is the very best thing I can ask of myself and my students: all of us future liars, generous juniors, and onion salespeople alike.

Imagine this: you are eight years old. You are strongly myopic with a cross-bite. Your pigeon-toes, corrected postnatally with an impressive brace, are now just a ghost in the machine.

You are one year away from your mother’s ex-communication from the Mormons and, therefore, two years shy of the whole “spawn of Satan” period. You are three years away from the impending Tampax bombshell and four years away from the molestation by your father’s oldest friend. (Minor for you, it will be major for him. Or, at least, that’s what the collective thinking will be when he dies by stepping in front of a Standard Oil truck.)

Into your lap, a copy of Harriet the Spy drops.

And you realize, suddenly, you are not alone. There is a tribe out there. A tribe of people who carry notebooks and know things. A tribe of people to whom you belong: The Writers.

Prior to this point, you didn’t know that this was a thing a person could be. You didn’t know that there were people who could do a thing they loved instead of what they hated. Or that a dream was a thing a person could decide to have.

And in this lightning-struck spark, a small light will flicker on. And you will notice the light, and the light will notice you.

And it will stay on, even during the lean years. The years when you forget yourself and stop writing. The year when you leave your husband, who will get married to someone else who will make him look far happier than he ever did with you. Or the year when your next lover, the one you thought you really loved, will go back home to the wife he was trying to run away from.

Sometimes, the light will rage and threaten to burn everything in its wake. This will scare you. Then, one day, you will wake up and realize the burning is happening only because you’ve ignored the light—you’ve let it burn down and all of its butter has run over the altar. Or, worse, you’ve tried to extinguish it by replacing it with somebody else’s light.

And then you buy a book, a really good book, from the famous guy who loves the Russians. Its matterlightblooming will speak to your light and remind you that you, too, have a light. That small, scrappy, flinty light you have shit on endlessly. That light that is still inside you, hollering in your chest, just waiting to be let out.

My parents created a slot canyon lined with blankets in the backseat where, tented by picture books, I camped for the nine-hour drive. Dick, Jane, Sally couldn't leave school grounds, but Sam I Am, Little Bear, and Miss Suzy the squirrel -- the entirety of my personal library -- accompanied me.

Previously, the few times my family had driven upstate, we left New York City after rush hour. Sunset burned outside the windshield. Above the illuminated highway stripes, black undulating humps rose lightless, lifeless.

"Mountains," my father said.

Monsters I heard and cowered.

This trip, we'd rise with the sun, drive all day, and get to Niagara Falls by dinnertime. None of us knew it back then, but we would move cross-state a total of five times in my first six years of school: west, east, south, north, center. Me the new kid, again and again and again.

By the second move I grasped that classmates couldn't be counted on. I formed reliable relationships with books, idolizing heroines who worked their way out of scrapes. The orphan who seeded her imagination across the fields and forests of Prince Edward Island. The freckled girl whose composition notebooks filled with peer reviews made her an outcast. The bored little sister whose route to adventure has since become an internet cliche.

If I moved between September and June, I'd look for my storyfriends during library period. In summer, my father would walk me to the town library where I'd sign my name to my own card.

The reunion always began with Anne. I'd search the stacks, M for Montgomery, hoping not just for Green Gables and Avonlea but all six Anne books. Then F for Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy, maybe even The Long Secret and Sport. The last a classic, C for Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

By the third move I earned adult borrowing privileges. That summer I took The Andromeda Strain on vacation.

"Who's carrying who?" an adult called out, seeing the thick pages propped against my bony knees. "The kid or the book?"

My father joined Book-of-the-Month Club and passed along The Martian Chronicles. I liked S is for Space, but Dandelion Wine shook the welcome mat of small town life. Clinton, NY felt too close to Green Town, Illinois.

Childhood warned me: Don't look back.

I stay present physically but risk time travel through literature, rereading the same 1983 Bantam paperback every two years.

Little, Big by John Crowley is set in a folly house -- a home with multiple facades of varying architectural styles -- where generations of Drinkwaters and Barnables truck with fairies and discover "the further in you go, the bigger it gets." Formerly a rootless child, protagonist Smoky Barnable marries into a house that's both prison and portal.

Similarly, in the slot canyon covid has scoured, I've returned to blankets and books. Hunkered down I'm liberated, joyous inside my head, my imagination the only home I've never, ever left.

Reading Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? in The Atlantic, 25 years after its publication in 2007 was enough to make me drop out of journalism school and join a graduate program devoted to its evil twin, Public Relations. I doubt that was its intent, but America changed a lot in those 25 years.

I graduated college with a degree in medieval Spanish poetry from a college in Central NY. America's universities are designed to make the punch of what college costs and what your return on investment will be be land a few years after graduation. After a few years of struggling in the workforce, I realized I was going nowhere. Maybe more degrees would help?

This time, I was smart. I took a job at NYU as whatever the polite term for secretary is and it came with free tuition. It was the heyday of Gawker and online journalism was still exciting and ascendant. The authors were no longer just dull WASPs who interviewed Pat Buchanan. They had voices and jokes and some even had regional accents like mine.

The parents of NYU students would barge in, demanding to see the Dean of the school where their child was attending when they got arrested for buying drugs in Washington Square Park, and my job was to be a polite, well-educated body to slow them down. I was bad at my job but by virtue of nothing earned. I was simply hired because a rich parent might see me and think: uh-oh, maybe I know his parents (they did not know my very mentally ill parents). There wasn't much to do, and in-between doing classwork and doing "work" for the University, I set out to read great journalism pieces of the past.

What I learned from reading the Great Works: If you try to re-sell a diamond, the jewel that culture says is the symbol of opulence and love and a proxy for devotion, you'll realize: it has no value. It's an inflated market because of concerted efforts by people in Public Relations to fund movies where diamonds were central to the story, to convince reporters to feature “size the diamond” in the story of every royal getting married, to news reporters to never cover what goes on in an actual mine. The Atlantic article showed the triumph of the concerted efforts of cynicism over the weakened body of reality.

What I decided, as I used my precious, limited credits under the spectre of an inevitable housing crash and newspapers folding across the country: We’re on our own, and would you rather be the person who wrote the article that was remembered 25 years later but had no industry, or an unnamed person in an article who didn’t have to take a job getting yelled at by rich parents? I switched schools and careers, and took the more cynical route. I regret it every day, but I regret it with the aid of health insurance.

On my 13th birthday, instead of being bar mitzvahed I played second oboe in the Youth Symphony of New York. Now I'm almost 52 -- four times 13; four new men -- and I'm preparing for my belated bar mitzvah. So for the first time in decades I find myself playing the oboe again.

I have to prepare a midrash for the ceremony -- my interpretation of a passage from the Torah, which has been selected based on my birth week. It is the story of the crossing of the Sea of Reeds. The Israelites, fleeing slavery and being pursued by their Egyptian masters, reach the shore of this sea and are faced with a conundrum: if they don't cross the sea, they will be killed; but if they try to cross the sea, they will probably drown.

I read ahead a bit and found out that they ended up getting to the far shore. But how?

The oboe is a "double-reed" instrument, but the reed is made from a single piece of cane, which is folded over, sculpted a bit, and then cut open -- creating two reeds that vibrate against each other.

When the Israelites reached the Sea of Reeds, they had two choices: to give up, or to cross. Either way, they were probably going to die, or at least be returned to servitude. But then they crossed, and emerged as a free people. (Well, kind of free.)

So again, how did they cross?

Well, they did something impossible, and then they became free (kind of).

Over and over again, I practice the oboe part of a Bach cantata, No. 82, "Ich habe genug." I think it means "I have enough" -- or possibly "I've had enough!" (I remember my father saying "Genug!" -- "Enough!" -- when something frustrated him. Note to self: Find out why Bach spoke Yiddish.) It's in a book of cantatas titled Difficult Passages. I do my best, with my flabby, out-of-shape embouchure, to hold my oboe's double-reed together tightly enough so that when I blow through it, it will make the right sounds.

My father died of a stroke before his 52nd birthday. I am, at best, a reflection of my father. I wish he would come back alive. That's impossible. I want to try to live beyond him, not as a reflection but as myself. I tell myself that's difficult.

So I'm thinking that my journey to (four times) manhood will involve turning the impossible into the merely difficult. I must make my embouchure strong enough (and sensitive enough) so the two reeds (actually, one) vibrate against each other in the proper way.

This suggests to me that the Israelites and the Egyptians, though the former were fleeing the latter, were really one thing. We are fleeing ourselves. It's impossible. But if we hold on tightly to our conflicting selves, and blow, then the passage may become only difficult.

What keeps me going is that afterwards we'll eat some kugel.

I taught tenth graders once. I survived one year. Of the six classes in my charge, the one I enjoyed sometimes was the smallest: eleven kids. One tired Friday, they asked for a story, and I told them to gather around on the carpet like kindergarteners and listen to one of my favorites, J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”

And everything was fine as I read about Muriel Glass on the phone with her mother, and Seymour Glass on the beach with the little girl, Sybil. Everything was fine until I approached that final paragraph, when my heart rate jumped, and sweat poured out, as it occurred to me that I might be about to traumatize eleven kids. But I kept reading, and when Seymour put the bullet in his head, one girl, Elizabeth, crumpled on the floor.

It’s a story that gets under your skin because, in retrospect, you should have seen it coming. People who’ve lost loved ones to suicide will say the same: I should have seen it coming. Why didn’t I?

I wish I could absolve that guilt from anyone who feels it, but it strikes me as one form of a universal worry: I have not paid sufficient heed. I haven’t paid attention.

Salinger is a master of the multivalent, koan-like, almost mythic symbol: kings kept on the back row in a checkers game, an ocean full of bowling balls, a teenage boy catching children before they run off a ledge. In this story, of course, the symbol is a bananafish, which eats so many bananas it gets stuck in its feeding hole, and dies.

Ever since first encountering the story in my own high school days, I have wondered what Seymour’s bananas were. His experiences as a soldier in World War II? The superficialities of his wife and mother-in-law? Sheer depression?

As a teacher, I was depressed. My bananas were fatigue, and the apathy of students, and loneliness. But rather than follow Seymour’s example, I followed his author’s. I put my sadness on the page, and made a screenplay of it.

Out of that screenplay came a film, which went nowhere, except that a connection from the film got me the job I’ve had for five years now, a much better job, for me, than teaching was. It brought me to Houston, where I met my wife, and now we have a son almost six months old.

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” taught me that when you take art to the darkest place, it becomes a place of light. It taught me, and still teaches me, to pay attention, to give heed to the small things that add up to the one short span we get to live.

Elizabeth, crumpled on the carpet, eventually got up, and years later sent me a poem she’d written about pain, devastation, and growing up. She, too, was paying attention. I had done something right, or the story had.

Half-Magic by Edward Eager. I read it over 40 years ago, yet not a day goes by that I don’t scan the ground or beach looking for a coin that might allow me to make wishes, and see the magic of books come alive here on earth. One day, I found a 5 Franc coin on a beach in Brittany. I felt like I had found a gold doubloon. My boyfriend, a logical German, just shook his head at me as I explained my life-long wish to find a wishing coin. In San Cristobal, Chiapas, Mexico, while walking to the supermarket, I found 11 cents, American: a dime and a penny. I taped them into my journal, and now those 11 cents are in my jewelry box. I’ve found a quarter in a snowbank and probably at least a few dollars worth of pennies in New York City. The other day in Loveland, Colorado I found a nickel, corroded with salt.

That book has kept alive the idea that there is more to this world than a simple life of working, and eating, and loving, and cleaning. The continuous search for the magic coin has given me joy when I was seriously ill, when I was going through divorce, and on normal sunny days when nothing much was happening. Somewhere always in my mind and always in my heart is this knowledge that magic is out there and that magic will find me.

As I write this, I realize that the magic is already in me, simply a perspective on the world, that sees coincidence as a vaguely remembered wish. Without Edward Eager’s Half Magic, I would have lived the same life as I have lived: it did not direct me towards a career or an education. Instead, it made my life magical, because magic was always around the corner, lying head-side up on a sidewalk or a beach.

When I was seventeen, an exceptionally large surgical wound on my abdomen became infected and was reopened and then left open, like a mouth hanging in disbelief. It was almost the size that you could put most of your fist into, but you wouldn’t have wanted to, probably.

And of all the challenges of major surgery that also leaves a sort of Civil War-style maw right under your navel, the most striking was that I could just barely move my legs. When your stomach has a hole, you lie down a lot, and when you lie down, you need abdominal muscles to sit up again, and also to shift your legs to the floor, and to laugh at the realization that trying to do just about anything electrifies your body with pain so white brightly seering you cannot believe you will ever want to sit up again, for the gasping-choking brutality of the endeavor.

It was in between these moments of trying to move, with that pain so sudden violent that I was rendered prostrate again, that I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a text that had lain on our family hearth and invited me with a title so sneeringly, hopefully superior that I couldn’t be sure of its intended effect, which at seventeen I did not realize was exactly its intended effect.

But in this book, amid the unknowable tragedies of the author, offered to the reader for consideration, indifferent to judgment (but then really, really deferential to judgment, really, as any of us would be, as I am in writing this), Eggers offers The Lattice, the idea that we are all connected and must be to survive, that the more people to whom we are connected, the more the weight of our existence is spread across a surface, snowshoe-like, to prevent our falling through.

And I liked this idea and held onto it, because I am comforted that the more I push experiences out of myself, redistribute the weight of the maw and every other maw and also joy I have known, I am able to remain on the surface. And I have trusted the thought that in the same connection which keeps me above ground, others can also push outward from themselves, sharing and offering and sprawling, with the whole world of us waiting for the gentle addition of their weight, which to them is so impossibly great but to us is nothing, is manageable, is welcome. And then together, we remain, strong and ready, on the surface, in the light, connected and pushing and still alive.