OM MANI PADME HUH?

In the sixth grade, I did a comic strip in the school paper. I could do that, because I was writing the school paper. One of the characters in my comic strip was a robot I’d named Tolkien.

My teacher, Mr. Larkin, seeing I was a fantasy fan, let me borrow a copy of this particular book from his collection.

I enjoyed it enormously, then proceeded to let my Bic ballpoint leak all over it.

I stalled until the end of the year and sheepishly gave it back to him. He was pretty kind about it, as you would hope.

He later left the sixth-grade gig and became better known as Peter Larkin, a disc jockey on WNEW-FM among other stations, a voiceover expert, and broadly experienced audiobook narrator.

The book’s cover illustrator was my boss for a while: Jack Endewelt was my department head who originally hired me to teach at my alma mater, the School of Visual Arts.

And I never borrowed a book again.