At 30 you’ve come a long way, and you’re standing on a landing surrounded by rooms with old bent doors swinging and banging in the breeze. Some of the rooms you can still see into, and you remember them perfectly because you think about them all the time anyway, especially at night.

You remember how happy you were in each of the rooms and who was there and what you did and how you laughed and what you learned and how good it really was. You wonder how you ever left such a fine and happy room, and how stupid you were, though people say you only remember the good things.

At 30 you’re standing at the top of the stairs looking madly around at all of the doors, and you wonder if you should go back into one of the rooms and which one it would be, but it’s so hard to decide because there are pieces of you in each of the rooms, and going into one would mean losing the parts of yourself that are in all the others and you wonder why you can’t be in multiple rooms at the same time but you know it doesn’t work that way.

Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.