I didn’t start out as a writer. I really started out as a non-reader who asked my grandmother, only about 35 times daily, what we were going to be doing all day long, every long day, for as long as we could do it. And before she collapsed from being overexposed to me, and my insanely good-natured interrogations, she produced a spread of books on the immense living room floor carpet and told me to “read them”.

I couldn’t read. I was four years old. So I read into the pictures.

All the books were about ancient cultures. And the pictures!

Wow! The pictures were from the Egyptian Book of the Dead,

Bible-story-recreations and the Lives of Saints, actually, more likely, the Deaths of Saints.

It was then that I got a really big interest in how people’s necks looked after their heads were cut off. I mean, was there blood, were there bones, did the head sing opera for hours later, was there a mess to clean up and did we need to get some cleanser and go help them? The deaths were really real to me as deaths; they were just weird old pictures and they were also interesting enough for somebody to write about them and add illustrations about a scene or two.

My grandmother was soon attempting to explain to me how all of these stories came to be and what really happened. I always assumed that my grandmother knew the real low-down on all of these stories because she was old, Gawd, was she old (I thought) and she probably met Moses, Esther, John the Baptist, anybody in any way, shape, or form who’d lived during the building of the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Temple of Solomon.

My grandmother’s word was the law. If she said Moses loved his

wife and bought her a nice anniversary present every anniversary, then it was true. It was true especially in the very moment that my grandfather was walking through the room.

“Moses always got his wife a very nice anniversary gift,” I’d repeat to my grandfather right after my grandmother told me.

Or, “The Pharaohs build things to last,” I’d say to my grandfather

right after my grandmother mentioned the plumbing leak in the

master bathroom upstairs. Or, “The Shah built his wife a really beautiful building when she was sick and dying and the marble he used was the best in the world and the gardens were wonderfully neat and organized and…..”. You get the picture.