How did they encourage my love of writing and poetry? Not very much, I don’t think. It was a very private thing with me and families weren’t
at least in my experience and now watching my own children and grandchildren. Families were not as hands on then with their children as they seem to be now. And a lot of it is that there wasn’t as much necessity to be as hands on. We were given a lot more freedom.
I grew up in Stanford mainly and in summertime, for example, from the time that you poked your head out of the door in the morning and either you take a little picnic lunch with you or you’d be home for lunch, but you were gone. Your mother didn’t know where you were. You traveled with a pack of kids. There was a golf course near our house that we had free reign of when the golfers weren’t around with a pond. We ice skated there in the winter.
Many blocks were our kind of bailiwick. We’d play cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, we’d race all around. We had enemies, we had friends. We knew everyone who lived there. In the fall, I sold Girl Scout cookies to everybody there and we practically, yes, we practically knew everyone in every house. Some were kind of scary or didn’t like kids or had a big dog that might be
so we knew which houses were the most-friendly ones; you knew where your friends lived.
But it was a very protective. I mean, you didn’t think of it that way then, but you had absolutely no fear except for the bully boys who would kind of take off after the girls and sometimes scare us to death. And there were little gangs — nothing like the gangs you hear of now — but there were kids that kind of stuck together and other kids that didn’t.
When I think of it, and even then I think I realized, I loved being a child. I’ve talked of this before, and I didn’t really, I was kind of Peter Pan-ish kid. I didn’t really want to grow up because I was convinced looking at my own parents and other adults that they had lost the ability to play. And I liked to play. And I thought that it is what it was — to grow up was to forget how to play. So I wanted to figure out how I could grow up, but not forget how to play.