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show was set to start and end five minutes after. This resulted in catching ON Video Jukebox pretty regularly, and before Poltergeist started, there was this band singing about being shy. I can still see and hear my dad as he stood in the doorway from the den to the pool, silhouetted by the glare of the midday sun (thankfully—my dad insisted on wearing a bikini Speedo throughout my entire childhood, regardless of how many of my friends were over to swim), as he said, “They call them ‘Kaja Goo Goo’ because they sound like they’re singing baby talk,” before cracking up at his own joke and disappearing into the glare seconds before we heard him splash into the pool.
    Poltergeist started up, and I instantly noticed how much the house and neighborhood in the film looked like mine. As the movie went on, I noticed other things that were just like my life: a little sister with a terrifying clown toy, a tree just outside my bedroom window, a swimming pool under construction a few houses over, quasi-hippie parents, and Zelda Rubenstein standing in the middle of my living room hollering about going into the light.
    Well, most of that, anyway.
    The movie terrified me so much, because it all seemed so plausible and looked so much like my neighborhood, that I put Amy’s clown toy in the garage (on top of the freezer with its bounty of ice cream sandwiches, where it was safely out of our house and in the perfect position to scare off any other kids who entertained notions of sneaking one or two out when nobody was looking) before I went to bed, where I slept with the light on. For several nights.

    Those memories, and a hundred others, flooded over me like a burst dam in the fifteen minutes it took to drive from the freeway to Ryan’s class along streets that were at once familiar and alien, as memories twenty-five years distant struggled to reveal themselves through the progress of the last two decades…. like the time when I was eight and I didn’t have the courage to tell Kelly that it wasn’t right to shoot a dove on a telephone wire with his BB gun. I watched in horror as he fired. A little poof of feathers burst out of the dove’s side before it flew away.
    That haunts me to this day.

my mind is filled with silvery star
           Just like close your eyes and then it’s past , this felt like too much of a list, and not enough of a story, to include in the book. My editor convinced me that, if we put them next to each other, it would provide a nice little break toward the middle of the book. I think he was right, and I’m glad we kept it.
    Y ou can learn a lot about someone from the songs they listen to, especially if that person is like me and music is much more than just background noise. As an exercise one afternoon, I put my iPod on shuffle and wrote up the immediate—and often most powerful—memory associated with each song. As much as my elementary and middle school years are dominated by sense memories associated with video games and places, my high school memories are inextricably intertwined with pieces of music.
    “Cinderella Undercover” by Oingo Boingo—I am driving my brand new 1989 Honda Prelude Si 4WS to work on Star Trek . I don’t know why, but in all of my memories, it’s early morning, it’s cold, and it’s a little foggy. I loved that car, and I feel compelled to remind you that it was just slightly better than Patrick Stewart’s.
    “Don’t Be Square, Be There” by Adam and the Ants—My friend Guy (who was also my stand-in on TNG) introduced me to Adam and the Ants via the Kings of the Wild Frontier album. I can still see the tape, an old TDK number with “Adam and the Ants” on one side and “Kings of the Wild Frontier” on the other, written in Guy’s really cool architect writing, in a smoky gray case with no paper insert. Guy lived in Costa Mesa, and after I got my Mac II—in color, with four frakking megabyes of RAM, man!—I’d put it in my car and drive down to