Elizebeth walked readers through sample problems and cheered them along: “You’re just eating ’em up.” “Bravo!” Meanwhile, she wrote a draft of a second book, a children’s history of the alphabet, illustrated with her own drawings of hieroglyphs and cuneiform tablets. She had begun working on it at Riverbank. The alphabet, part of the backdrop of our lives, like the sky or electricity or advertising, but the one tool that makes all the others possible—she wanted kids to
