The Other Side of the Island

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My kids had been nagging me for years to write a book for them.  I told them no.  Magic doesn't interest me.  I don't care much for potions and broomsticks and magic spells.  “I don't do dragons,” I declared.  Then one day I reread 1984.  I remembered how much I love Orwell.  I recalled how I love dystopias and satire and Gulliver's Travels.  And I looked around me and I thought, the world is so complex and scary.  The news and weather are terrifying all by themselves.  Maybe someday.  Still, I didn't write a book for children.  Then one summer in Boston we had a heat wave.  It was even more miserably sticky than usual.  You just want to move from your air conditioned house to your air conditioned car to the air conditioned store.  One afternoon as I rushed home to lie on my couch in my cool living room with the curtains drawn I moaned aloud, “Ah.  What a relief.  I wish the streets were air conditioned.”  Even as I said the words, I thought, how sad to run away from a summer day!  How spoiled we are, always seeking refuge from cold and heat and rain and snow.  We hardly want to live in the world anymore.  And then it came to me—a strange line, like the beginning of a fairy tale.  “All this happened many years ago, before the streets were air conditioned.  Children played outside then, and in many places, the sky was still naturally blue.”  The sentence came to me all in a piece.  That night I wrote it down in my notebook.  There is a book here, I said to myself.  I just have to think of the rest.