I’ve written exactly one fan letter in my life…

…and I wrote it when I was damn near forty. Sent it to Virginia Heinlein, who responded with a very thoughtful and gracious reply. I misplaced that letter in one of my many subsequent moves, and it’s almost the only old possession I regret losing.

I wrote my letter because it had gradually occurred to me that RAH was almost singularly responsible for teaching me something important, something the authority figures that infested my childhood would never have bothered themselves to mention and certainly could never have demonstrated…

I remember writing that for reasons I wouldn’t inflict on her, I didn’t have a happy childhood. Every lesson I absorbed from the people around me taught that expediency and pain-avoidance were the highest, indeed the only imperatives. And that the only hints I ever received during that period that it wasn’t so, that a person might develop a better character through being driven by principle rather than the threat of the moment, all seem to have come from reading Heinlein’s “juvenile” books. Which I did obsessively.

Learning what those principles ought to be was the harder part: I’ll be sixty years old in less than three weeks and I’m still working on that. But the first and most important hurdle was learning that there even were such things.

I’m not suggesting that I ever became much of a paragon of character. The opposite is true: Heinlein’s stories were interesting, but the lessons I received less vicariously tended to hurt. It’s like training a dog: He’ll learn all the wrong things most indelibly if they’re taught with pain. High character has never been my defining feature, but I suspected it was out there somewhere. I wanted to see it.

I am and have always been a coward through and through. I have a history of cowering under the lash – at least until the whip-holder turns his back. Then I’ll cut his throat in his sleep. Have you ever read Kipling’s A Pict Song? That was me. I loved that poem, very privately.

But resisting the Stockholm Syndrome is not the same thing as being brave, and I want to be brave. Divesting myself of things to lose was a way of moving in that direction, and I like to think that it has had some effect in the eight or ten years I’ve practiced it. I won’t really know until I’m seriously put to the test.

But I do remember what turned out one of the most joyful moments of my life: I was financially punished and threatened with prosecution by a certain federal agency for failure to perform acts of submission indicative of good citizenship. And far from being afraid, I felt a sort of glee. I did something I once would have regarded as utterly juvenile. And I’m still doing it.

More on this later, it’s going to be a busy morning and I have to get to it.