When I was growing up in New York City, I shied away from tough Irish-Catholic kids like Michael Meade. They ran in gangs, and they got into trouble with the cops, and sometimes they beat up nice little Jewish boys like me.
Gang fights on Friday night, dances on Saturday night, church on Sunday, school on Monday: these were the touchstones of Meade’s life until his thirteenth birthday, when his aunt gave him a copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. He was stunned by the stories, which he read and reread. “The tales of gods and goddesses and humans caught in extreme and mysterious situations seemed more like life than anything else I had heard or read,” he says. They opened “a vast dwelling place within, where the imagination and emotions denied by family, school, and church were accepted. In many ways, I’ve never stopped reading that book.”
