It’s written in pencil on a large sheet of now-yellowed newsprint whose bottom half has the wide-ruled lines for beginning writers, and I’m pretty sure it’s my first essay, from first grade. In its entirety, it reads, “When I grow up I will never get married.” The illustration on the top half shows a man in a red shirt whose black hair wraps like a nimbus around his circular head and a yellow-haired woman in a flounced purple skirt. “Get married with me,” he says in a cartoon balloon, and she says, “No, no.”
