I graduated college with a degree in English. I had 30 credits in literature and 12 in writing. A friend said I majored in reading for pleasure and she wasn’t wrong.

I almost had a double major – the other one would have been history. I wound up with 27 credits in history and needed 30. By my first term of my senior year, I was cutting a lot of classes. I hadn’t been to my history class for a while so I decided to check them out in late November or early December. I walked in and they were taking the final! The professor would have let me make up the work with a paper but I never did that. For that semester, I had four A’s in English classes and an incomplete in my history class.

My favorite period to study was the American Civil War In the early 1960s, there was a lot of attention paid to it because of the 100th anniversary of the war. In the summer of 1963, right before I turned 10, my family went to Virginia and toured Civil War battlefields. When we got back, I started reading adult Civil War books such as those by Bruce Catton. I never had a phase of reading books for teenagers. I went from kids books to adult books.

We had a hamster when I was young. I was probably about 12 when I decided to put Fang on a turntable. When I played it at 16, he was running like he did on the wheel and he was ahead of the pace of the turntable. At 33, he was even. At 45, he was losing ground. At 78, he was airborne.

I never played him at 78 again.

He lived for 3 years.