For a lot of reasons: lousy personality, odd obsessions, a reading addiction, and peculiar parents, I was an alone child, but not usually a lonely child.  Alone was my preferred state most of the time, and then, suddenly, my world would seem small as an ice cube and I'd start wishing one more time I was a contortionist. If I was a contortionist, I reasoned, people would come see me, but on my terms: with my legs behind my ears. Those terms.

But when I was eleven and in the throes of my periodic loneliness, I discovered I could write to faceless institution which would send me stuff. I could scrawl out a letter and The Institution would answer, and I didn't have to be a contortionist after all. It was a wonderful revelation. We lived in Washington DC then, so I wrote to all the embassies I could think of, got fat envelopes in return, full of maps and pamphlets describing the glories of, say, Singapore.

And then, I switched over to writing to religious groups, the kind that send people to your house. This is how I wound up talking to a lady from the Seventh-Day Adventists every Saturday for close to a year. In nice weather, she would stand at our open front door and talk to me for about an hour or so, then leave me with a fist-full of pamphlets. In foul weather, she'd step into our tiny foyer and give me her hushed views on Adventism. It was then, probably, that I noticed she smelled like a wet dog and her notions, even to a non-enthusiastic Episcopalian like myself, seemed nuts. This whole episode in my life contains a lot of mystery: Why did this lady keep talking to an eleven year old girl? ANS: She was shy, at least that's my best guess. Why did this go on for a year? ANS: I really wanted those goddamn pamphlets so I teased her along. I was an autodidact loony. I loved oddball knowledge and was busily teaching myself Esperanto as well.

But over time, by splashing around in the Deepening Lake of Apparently Useless Knowledge, gradually, very gradually, I learned to think for myself, although not in any way the schools taught. My ideas and answers came through the stuff I happened to notice. And so, when pondering the question Why does my boy keep getting so sick? first, I sifted through my psychic pile of old matchbooks and chewing gum wrappers.

I remembered the the hostility emanating from the first wave of home rehab workers. It puzzled me at the time and then I'd just thought, Who gives a shit? I also remembered looking at my boy and thinking He's not right in the head, while medical people and friends alike commented on how great he was doing. That confused me because I was pretty sure he was dying. I puzzled over the heavy starchy canned food he got in the hospital; I flashed on his times in isolation and the casual way people came and went, draping a tyvec suit around themselves and squirting on a blob of hand cleaner. I wondered why his rehab doctor mostly shrugged at my questions, then told me he had gained all the mobility he was likely to gain. Why? Why did she say that?

And why was I so fucking depressed? I'd faced ghastly situations before, and I'd never curled up into a damp fearball or entertained fantasies about skedaddling to Mexico. What was up with that?

But I also knew that when I can't get off the dime, it's generally because of some idea I can't stomach, so I lie on the couch and watch Law and Order reruns until my brain unsnarls. Finally, one night I lay on my couch at 3 AM, after my boy had finally sacked out, but I didn't watch Law and Order. I thought about Job instead.

I've always believed that the worst aspect of Job's plight was not losing his land and being covered with boils. It was having his in-laws visit him while he squatted on his pile of dung, with every self-righteous prick eager to tell Job what he was doing wrong. Now that seemed familiar territory, I thought, remembering the parade of cross, credulous, overly optimistic, and sullenly indifferent folks I'd been encountering. Then I recalled a scholarly paper my uncle-the-professor had written about Job. He always contended that the story of Job was actually a comedy, since it had a prosperous ending: the classical definition of a comedy. 

By God, he was right! I thought, sitting bolt upright, it could be we're  smack dab in the middle of a comedy. And so, that night, I began to jot down the outlines of our Good Luck Charlie Happiness Project. It was a direction at least, and one that promised more than our current day-to-day droopy-drawers floundering.

Turn this blight, this effing pox into a comedy? It seemed possible.

After all, I'd never written any story with an unhappy ending.