HE IS STANDING outside Broadway Elementary, looking for the El Camino.
His first month at school has confirmed what his mother already suspected—he has a talent for artistic expression; but there are signs he will struggle with reading and with arithmetic. His teachers seem to adore him, although he gleefully disregards many of their directives, painting outside the lines whenever it suits him and inserting fanciful creatures and space vessels into what are supposed to be realistic reproductions of his life in Spokane circa 1972. He gets on well with his classmates and even shows signs of becoming ‘popular,’ but only after a catastrophe on the first day when, in a state of terror at his father’s departure, he approached the blackboard, and—in an attempt to master his surroundings—drew a m
