When I was a child, I was convinced that something miraculous was about to happen. I lived a very ordinary and very unhappy life, yet I was certain that at any moment all that would change. It was an everyday possibility, this miracle of mine. It could happen any time, while I buttered toast in the kitchen or played kickball out on the street. Birthdays came and went, but I never wavered in my belief. 'Sooner or later I'd meet up with my destiny, and time didn't matter, at least not back then. If I could wait the eight or nine years until I was old enough for a driver's license, well, then I could most assuredly wait for a miracle as well.

My fortune seemed most likely to improve on those afternoons when I walked to the library in the next town. The route I took was a green, leafy path, so removed from the asphalt of our neighborhood, so overgrown with weeds it was almost possible to forget the leaves hid a chain-link fence and that it wasn't a river flowing on the other side of the fence but rather the start of rush-hour traffic on the Southern State Parkway. Each day as I set out from home I was confident this was to be the hour of my miracle, and when it did not happen, I refused to be disappointed. Frankly, I'd been disappointed enough.

By the age of seven I'd discovered that families don't necessarily stay together. By eight I'd found out that those who vow they will love you forever can easily disappear. By nine I knew that even when your mother kissed you good night and promised you'd sleep tight, she herself might be up till all hours worrying about those problems that so plague grownups-food and laundry, dollars and cents, love and agony.

No matter what grownups may say, children know there are monsters in the world. They may not be in the closet or under the bed, but they're there all the same. They're on the street corner, robbing you on your way home from school. They're walking the avenues with matches, guns, and knives. They're in the boys' room and the girls' room at school, on the other side of the window or below the sink. They're in a teacher's heart,
an uncle's hands. They're your meanest brother, the one who won't leave you alone.

They're you sometimes, the way you feel inside.

Facts are facts: the monsters are, were, and always will be there. But to me it seemed only fair that there be miracles as well. As it turned out, there were, although it was years before I realized that my miracle had been happening all along. It wasn't an amulet, which would grant three wishes, or a beast who could speak, or a rose that would never die. It was the best sort of miracle, the kind that happens when the heat outside is blistering or when a storm is brewing: when everything in your life is out of your control. It happens when you are eight, or ten, or twelve, at the moment when you discover that when you walk into a library, you have complete freedom. You can leave your world behind and enter into any book you select. Here, where there is quiet, there are, at last, choices to be made. No one will tell you what to believe or how to feel. Best of all: no one will tell you what you can and cannot imagine.

I think now that I would not have survived my childhood if not for those walks to the library. Books were the true miracle in my life, my salvation and my ticket out-a blessing I'm grateful for every single day. Nothing is as intimate, as healing, as private as a book.

Often the people who succeed, in spite of the difficulties they may face, have one thing in common. They read. They are the people who can escape into a book, who know there are other worlds to be found. They are the ones who carry books with them to movie theaters and street corners, who lock themselves in the bathroom to read when everyone in the house is too noisy, who open a new chapter when the world outside their windows is too horrible or disappointing or simply too fast. They have hope because they know that once upon a time there was a boy or a girl, a woman or a man, who managed to survive. Somewhere, among the pages and the print, there was someone who found solace or justice or truth, or maybe just a chance to tell her own story.