Alyson

I have a problem being an “average American” in an “average American family.” There are so many of them. I want to be at the center of everything that happens. Not in a the-world-revolves-around-me way, it’s just that the best view is at the center of it all. And, yes, being in the center increases my chances of being seen, too.

I want to be in every family. I want to witness the “extra” as it is conjoined with the “ordinary.” I want to see it waiting in the wings: putting a dent in—or smoothing one over—an ordinary unknown’s journey to success. Success in extraordinary terms.

I want to collect rolls of mental footage like seashells, unpolished—of parks, malls, restaurants, schools, libraries, pharmacies. I want to know about the families that live in the tract houses below the freeway, in a dimension of their own. And I want to learn about the folks who live in a wooden abode atop the hill whose house is constant host to the skinny but attractive white cross deliberately standing next to it. I want to explore, not the families that occupy the grand-finale residencies at the end of the cul-de-sac, but every group of people in between.

I want to know all this so that I can write you the best essays and stories, draw and paint scenes you can’t resist sliding back to, because you see a twinkle of yourself in them, average American. ♦