My Life as a Mystic.

Little kids have such strange worldviews.

For instance, I remember sitting in the RCA Dome with my father when I was seven and wishing that I had some terminal illness so that I would have enough moral weight to convince God to let the Colts win a football game.

I'd sit and scrunch my fingers and toes, eyes closed, envisioning some bed-ridden self persuading the Lord Our Savior that nothing would make me happier in this life than to see Jeff George throw a game-winning pass. And at the end of a game, I would be less disappointed that the Colts hadn't made a miraculous come-back in the fourth quarter, than I was to find I could not produce this result through sheer power of will. How did the kids in The Mighty Ducks do it? Maybe it had something to do with Emilio Estevez.

Also at seven, or perhaps younger, I remember being very concerned about whether adults could read my mind. It seemed to me that if they could, that whole "What did you do?" or "Are you lying to me?" device they kept pulling was highly duplicitous, a completely unnecessary test of my honesty. But how else could they know I was the one who put pennies in the computer's disk drive?

A misunderstanding of astigmatism left me believing, until my mom disillusioned me, that no one saw the same shape for an object. Your circle was very probably my square and you had better get used to it.

I remember sunlight hitting the dust particles floating in my parent's bathroom and thinking these were atoms. The fact that no one else could see them meant I had Special Powers.

I could go on. In retrospect, I only barely missed becoming Miss Cleo. "The cards never lie!"