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Or the Crooked (in body, not in mind) Magician, Dr.
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First, there was the colorful young Munchkin, Ojo the Unlucky, and his soon-to-be-turned-to-stone Unc Nunkie. I found myself immersed in a panoply of voices, and as they chattered, they carried me into fantastically believable landscapes. It’s about going along for the ride, even when you aren’t entirely certain how the ride works, or where you’re going until you get there. The writing was way above my comprehension level, but as anyone who enjoys reading knows, comprehension isn’t what good fiction is remotely about. On the day after Christmas, when the biggest toys were either broken or had failed to live up to their glitzy commercial propaganda, I woke early, and found the large, brightly jacketed book untouched on my side-table when our parents came in a few hours later, I had read well past the halfway point - so hypnotically absorbed, in fact, that I decided to continue reading rather than plant myself (as usual) in front of the morning cartoons. Frank Baum, which turned out to be a lasting influence on my imaginative life. And, several years earlier, when I was six, I received a large hardcover reprint edition of The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L.
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For example, on Christmas Eve 1968, when I was 13, my mother gave me the Beatles’s White Album, and I slept that night on the living room couch playing and replaying the three Apple-logoed LPs on the automatic spindle of our bulky console stereo until I had incorporated “Rocky Raccoon,” “Blackbird,” “Helter Skelter,” and even “Revolution 9” into a dream-track of musical associations that resonate festively in my brain half a century later. But when I look back at the best Christmas presents I received from my own parents, the pleasures they delivered were inversely proportional to their expense. LIKE MANY DIVORCED FATHERS, I always overcompensated at Christmas, buying my son extravagant big-ticket items months in advance - gaming consoles and video games, build-your-own Lego and Meccano kits, boxed sets of magic tricks and chemistry labs, an elaborate system of tubes, mazes, and wheels to house a new hamster, and several much-too-complicated multi-part plastic robots and spaceships that took hours to assemble and reassemble, leaving us irritable and exhausted by the time we figured out which doohickeys fit into which thingamabobs.