Introduction:

When I was a kid I believed everything I was told, everything I read, and every dispatch sent out by
my own overheated imagination. This made for more than a few sleepless nights, but it also filledthe
world I lived in with colors and textures I would not have traded for a lifetime of restful nights. I
knew even then, you see, that there were people in the world — too many of them, actually —whose
imaginative senses were either numb or completely deadened, and who lived in a mental state akin to
colorblindness. I always felt sorry for them, never dreaming (at least then) that many ofthese unimaginative
types either pitied me or held me in contempt, not just because I suffered from any
number of irrational fears but because I was deeply and unreservedly credulous on almost everysubject. 'There's a boy,' some of them must have thought (I know my mother did), 'who will buy the
Brooklyn Bridge not just once but over and over again, all his life.'
There was some truth to thatthen, I suppose, and if I am to be honest, I suppose there's some
truth to it now. My wife still delights in telling people that her husband cast his first Presidential
ballot, at the tender age oftwenty-one, for Richard Nixon. 'Nixon said he had a plan to get us out of
Vietnam,' she says, usually with a gleeful gleam in her eye, 'and Steve believed him!'
That's right; Steve believed him.Nor is that all Steve has believed during the often-eccentric course
of his forty-five years. I was, for example, the last kid in my neighborhood to decide that all those
street-corner Santas meantthere was no real Santa (I still find no logical merit in the idea; it's like saying
that a million disciples prove there is no master). I never questioned my Uncle Oren's assertion that
you couldtear off a person's shadow with a steel tent-peg (if you struck precisely at high noon, that
was) or his wife's claim that every time you shivered, a goose was walking over the place where your
grave...