As a small child, I had a big imagination. I think it came from hanging out with my cousins, all playing together at family visits and listening to  stories as told by our parents, and also by my dad’s fishing and hunting buddies, who were great at making a mundane story more interesting by mentioning all the details often overlooked in the course of discourse.  Another source of creativity came out of necessity.
          Because we didn’t get the latest, greatest, must-have toys, we made up our own. One of my earliest memories was lying in the brome grass pasture near my home in South Dakota, creating a vast jungle in my tiny mind’s eye. I might have had a small plastic soldier, or a stone that served as a turtle; a piece of string might become a python; a coin a UFO, hopelessly lost and out of control, destined to crash on an unknown planet.
          There were times when it was too hot outside when I would bring a tiny twig into the house, no longer that a couple of inches, and it would become a scaled-down version of a submarine, hovering far off the bottom of the gargantuan aquarium that was our living room, exploring all the depths and features of the underwater world.
          Once, when I was nine or ten, I was lying in bed, enacting the scene that many years later, would become the basis for ‘A Tale of Two Fish’.
​​​​​​​          As I look back into the misty library of memories, I find it less and less surprising that these stories and this series have come to life, and find myself more and more excited to share them with anyone who might enjoy them.