I had such delightful dreams last night. Ever since getting out of the daily grind—I'm on "sabbatical," let's call it, this month—I have been flying again in my dreams. I haven't had the gumption to get off the ground in recent memory, but last night I was soaring. Turns out it's like riding a bike.

I don't know why I thought of that when I read just now that Madeleine L'Engle has died. Maybe because her books about Meg and Charles Wallace mind-fucked me at a very early age, influencing forever the landscape of my dreams. In waking life, they gave me a sense of the eerie otherness of things, which I have not lost.

Growing up in the seventies and early eighties, we had some pretty funky books to choose from, didn't we? Anything by Shel Silverstein was all right by me. And the author's photo on the back flap, with his guitar and his foot, and that sultry, so not-suitable-for-children's-books stare, always fascinated me...


You know what I'm sayin'? I was like, wow, what is that look? We don't have that look in Kid World.

And then his words and pictures were infused with something we didn't have in Kid World, either. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but it came as no surprise to discover in adulthood that he had produced a coffee-table book full of rated-R cartoons (Different Dances) that were a lot like his G-rated cartoons, only more so.

Silverstein was a gifted songwriter, too. Did you know he wrote "A Boy Named Sue"? Not a stretch when you think about it, is it? He also wrote the anti-VD anthem, "Don't Give A Dose to the One You Love Most." Still very handy advice.

I also read Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, with his neighbor Jules Feiffer's illustrations over and over and over again, and loved it more each time.

I haven't reread A Wrinkle in Time recently—but my other favorites have certainly endured, and journeys to a slightly tilting planet still loom large in my shadowy memories of that alternate universe we call, for lack of a better word, Childhood.