Seventeen years ago on a sticky Alabama day, four children sat together in the back of a Tahoe that looked like a green potato. The heat nestled around the sleeping children, and the ride was quiet and peaceful. Carefree. Maybe it seemed that way because I was only six years old at the time and knew that I wouldn’t be the one paying the mortgage after we struck gold on our house-hunting excursion. Or perhaps it was a power more magical than Tinkerbell’s dust that hid in spring’s leftover pollen. I can still see the grain of the pollen on our windshield, seed sacs staining the rain-wipers yellow.

I remember something else clearly--the way my foot, kind of squishy and stumpy at the time, kicked out in front of me in the back seat. Tahoes in those days weren’t made for a family of six. That’s why my little brother and I sat in the back of the vehicle on a detachable suede seat that faced the car’s rear and not its front. A straw cowboy hat sat between us, one that we probably got from our surrogate aunt or from my grandfather’s retirement home. I snatched it up and tossed it on my foot. 

 “Look,” I told my little brother, looking into his Bambi eyes, shaking the hatted foot around. Then the sight transformed. A wry smile popped up on my sock’s emerging face and the visitor’s eyes, the shape and size of raisins, winked at us as if we were familiar friends. I wonder what my brother and I, my second set of siblings (another brother and sister who claimed the middle seats), and even the cowboy foot would have thought that day if they knew what these playful stories would become. This wasn’t any day, let me remind you. Something vital or sacred hushed in the air, for in that afternoon one character produced a million more, and the stories told with my foot became the stories of my life. 

      Helen Keller, One Direction--everyone has stories of their lives. And in the words of Black Elk, if this were only the story of my life I think I would not tell it. For what is one woman that she should make so much of her winters, even when they’re heavy as snow? Yet when I glance back at my twenty-four cold seasons, wondering where my untouchable friends who my foes call “make-believe” came from, when I question how a child’s rabbit trails evolved into pubescent interstates with palaces at pit stops, each tale with its own castle, each character with his own room, I cannot help but feel, though nervous to admit it, that these stories don’t just belong to me.

The tales not only belong to my brothers but also my sister who has Down syndrome. When people live with a loved one who has special needs their lives are not going to be like anyone else’s. Her soul has warped into my weave. The magic absurdity that I’ve conjured for years with improv skits, poems, novels, screenplays, and sketches, in some vain attempt to convince the world of existences it deems outlandish, is due largely to her. I have grown accustomed to her heartfelt impulses and disregard for modern taboos that have blurred and stretched the edges of what should be and what could be. And for that, I am so thankful, don’t let me lie. I am blessed with a blessing that bathes me with warm sunlight, and sometimes, when I’m self-absorbed, slaps me like a cold fish on a cloudy day.

 My writings belong to the period in time when we moved to our new house. It was a move that came at that delicate age when forks and knives on the dinner table could turn into children; when there was no difference between bathrooms and mansions, warzones and backyards. When I now try to express the way things were when they were that way, creating haunts with talking monkeys or nerdy planets, I feel in awe. Every story I spin is from the wool someone else has offered. Each story’s necklace is from a multitude of beads. 

 My Lord, my parents, my siblings, my Tahoe, my friends. Bead upon bead upon bead upon bead. 

It’s by these beads that I know that, while my ebbing worlds are often strange even to me, they’re only strange because they’re strangely familiar. They’re worlds of muck and magic that emerged from that butter-in-the-sky day in our green baked potato car when we saw, my brother and I, my foot turn into a cowboy.

They’re the stories of my life, but they’re not just mine.

How else could they have lasted so long?