Beautiful piece. Thanks for this.

The opening of Henry and the Paper Route grabbed my brain and my heart when I was just beginning to read. Something about the glimpse at interiority, I think. Henry’s busy hands. The little detail of the golf ball. The sense of a mind, wandering. I still think about this passage all the time:

One Friday afternoon Henry Huggins sat on the front steps of his white house on Klickitat Street, with his dog Ribsy at his feet. He was busy trying to pick the cover off an old golf ball to see what was inside. It was not very interesting work, but it was keeping him busy until he could think of something better to do. What he really wanted, he decided, was to do something different; but how he wanted that something to be different, he did not know.