One day when I was in the fourth grade, our teacher, Evelyn Miller, brought us back from lunch and spent half an hour reading to us. The story that day was about a boy who was given the chore of painting the fence around his aunt's home and how he convinced his friends to pay him to let them paint it. That story, of course, was from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain. I remember the day, the moment she read that to us - because that was the moment I began to dream of being a writer.
