Loss and joy

I had a happyish childhood. I grew up in a small Southern town, Lake Charles, La., in an old house filled with books and music, situated on a lot surrounded by semitropical forest. The woods were beautiful, mysterious and exciting. For a young boy in Lake Charles in the early 1960s, "exciting" meant encounters in the trees with possums, fireflies and redbirds, and to spice things up, huge creepy spiders, repulsive, prehistoric-sized cockroaches and poisonous snakes -- water moccasins, black with the spooky white gullet that gives them their nickname, "cottonmouth."

By Tony Kushner

October 31, 2004