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neighborhood in Kokomo, so I could walk over to see her when we wanted to do our homework together. If the weather was fine, we sat side by side on her stoop. One day she gave me a needlepoint picture of four hearts surrounding my name. She had stitched it herself and had it framed for me. Wow! I thought. She knows I love presents, so I guess she really likes me.

    Then I also had three other good friends who lived right across the street—Chris Sadler, Blair Brittain, and Heath Bowen, who was a year behind me at Western. Sometimes Grandpa took Heath and me fishing with him. Grandpa feels the same way about his fishing boat as I do about cars. It’s a motorboat with high seats so you can see out over the water. He belongs to a bass fishing club in Kokomo, and he’s usually number one in the club because he’s caught the most and the biggest fish at Lake Manitou. But he says there’s always a couple of other guys nipping at his heels, and he has to keep his hand in. I doubt Heath and I were much help with the competition because we usually didn’t want to wait around for a bite. We’d try to get Grandpa to rev up his motor pretty quick and race his boat up and down the lake. When we were along, he didn’t catch very many fish at all.
    When we weren’t scaring off Grandpa’s bass, my friends and I all biked endlessly around the streets in our neighborhood, racing each other. We rooted for the Dodgers and the Cubs. Grandpa had loved the Dodgers ever since they played in Brooklyn. I know the Cubs always find a way to lose the World Series, but since we live in Indiana, they’re the closest we have to a home team.
    And we were all into playing army, especially me. I felt like I’d started our fad. I already had a big toy-gun collection. Even Andrea had a few pink and green plastic water pistols. I was big on building models of fighter planes. My bedroom ceiling looked like a squadron flying in formation. My aunt Janet had mailed me some camouflage pants and a real parachute from an army store in Birmingham. Chris and Blair and Heath and I would head for the woods, hunt each other over rocks and through trees, and demolish each other with fire crackers. Sometimes we let my oldest cousin, Monica, come along. But Blair and Heath would try to teach her swear words, and I had to shut them up. Her dad, my uncle Tommy, drove me out to the lake every week to go swimming with Monica and her younger brothers, and I didn’t want him getting mad at me.
    It’s okay going someplace with my boy cousins, or practicing karate with them in the backyard. But I wasn’t too happy about them coming over and getting into my Star Wars or car collections, or about my sleeping at their house. I mean, a door has a handle; it works nicely. But you can bet that my cousins will ignore the knob and leave their fingerprints all over the door frame and even the wall. Another thing: My youngest cousin, Brian, likes racing up and down stairs. For no reason. Asking him to stop—or just telling him—doesn’t work. Believe me, I’ve tried.
    So most of the time when Mom and Andrea went away, I stayed at my grandparents’. That summer Grandma had broken her leg, so I told her, “I’ll take care of you for a change.” I fetched her sodas, heated up food for her in her microwave oven, and ran errands on my bike. There was only so much worrying she could do when she couldn’t follow me around. Every now and again, it was a big relief, I can tell you, to have a relative who was sicker than I was. The pressure was off—my family had someone besides me to fuss over for a change. Besides, I could really help because I knew about broken bones and sicknesses from spending so much time in the hospital. Whenever I was stuck in there, I always asked a lot of questions and made sure I knew what medicine I was getting, how much, and why.
    Once, later on, I even figured out that Grandpa was having a heart attack before he did. He was sitting on his sofa