In school I was always terrible in math. If I passed I was thrilled, but I usually didn’t pass and had to repeat the class or go to summer school. In tenth grade, my parents shipped me off to a difficult private all boys boarding school because I was doing so poorly in public school. It was a disaster. That first year I flunked math and most other classes as well. Summer school loomed. Not only that, but summer school at the school which meant I would have to live for another month on campus. I didn’t like school but my best subject was English, so I decided since I had to be there anyway, I might as well take the creative writing course that was being offered. It was taught by a man who had published a couple of stories in THE NEW YORKER years before, so he was considered the school’s writer in residence. After the class had been in session for a couple of weeks, he came in one morning and said today we’re going to do something different; I’m going to read you a story. I don’t know if we groaned but we probably did. It was summer. It was hot. We were fifteen. There were a million other things we would rather have been doing. Most of us read only for school and then only because we were forced to.

It was a story by Thomas Wolfe entitled “Circus at Dawn.” It’s about two little boys who live in rural North Carolina. The high point of every year for them was when the circus came to town for a few days. The story is essentially a description of the boys sneaking out of the house very early one summer morning to watch the circus train arrive at the station, unload, and then set up. The kids watch as exotic animals are led out of their boxcars, performers appear, the workmen start to assemble the tent and other things. Of course these rural kids are goggle eyed with wonder at everything. To my surprise the story was pretty interesting. While listening to the teacher read, I gazed out the window at the summer sky.

Towards the end of the story when the tent had been raised and most of the work was finished, the circus people all sat down together to eat. Wolfe described in glorious delicious detail the meal they were served: Stacks of pancakes and waffles with butter and maple syrup, hot smoking canisters of coffee, fried eggs with rashers of bacon, steaks and hamburgers hot off the grill, etcetera. He went on and on just describing breakfast. Caught up in those gorgeous details I was right there, smelling, tasting, eating that breakfast too. The teacher stopped to take a breath. I heard the slightest “plip” sound somewhere nearby. Slowly looking down at my brown wood desk, I saw a shiny spot. Saliva. I had drooled. I was so affected by Wolfe’s descriptions of food that I had unconsciously drooled. I stared at that small shiny drop on my desk and to this day I remember very clearly the blossoming awe I felt.

Then.

That’s when I knew I wanted to be a writer. If something I wrote could have that effect on someone fifty years after I’d written it, then that’s what I wanted to do.