On January 28, 1973, the Paris peace accords were signed, ending the war in Vietnam. My husband and I had turned thirty and were living in north Philadelphia—three young children in a big, old house shared with a facsimile of a commune. That night my husband took our five-year-old son to the candlelight gathering in honor of the end of the war. It was a moment of victory that over the years has faded to defeat but at the time for young men like my husband who had been waiting to be dispatched to southeast Asia, the spirit on the streets of Philadelphia was joyous. And the spirit in our house was one of adventure bordering on chaos.

The commune had been travelling in a VW van from Colorado to Vermont by way of Philadelphia and was delivered to our doorstep whole cloth by my younger brother. They never made it to Vermont and so we lived in relative harmony with a large vegetable garden in the yard, pot luck parties every weekend, daily hikes along the river, a general sense of satisfaction. Or malaise.

I always wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons when I was a teenager. Why?

• It seemed like an appropriate thing to do for a person who looked like I did then.
• I had a suspicion that the people who played would accept me for who I was.
• I loved the books!

Number three was most important. I really did love those D&D rulebooks. I had an uncanny ability to sit and read them and imagine what my characters would be like, and draw up charts and maps, and buy weapons for a big adventure… all without ever having another person to play with!

It makes sense now. The part of other teenagers’ minds that was turned on by the parsing of data (I’m thinking about baseball cards and comic books; two decades later, this escapist instinct is exemplified by the cataloging of vast media archives) was satisfied for me by these books. They all got food in their spines and eventually rotted apart.

But I never found anyone to play with.