2006-09-09 - 2:02 p.m.
When I was very little my mom took a map of the city out of the phone book and traced a rectangle on it with blue marker, telling me "You can go anywhere within these lines, but not beyond."Every year or so, after I had grown up a little bit, she would take that same map and traced another, bigger, area for me to explore, saying the same thing. Each time she did this I would faithfully restrain myself to the boundaries laid out, and would learn my allotment with great intimacy, because I explored so much.
When I graduated from high school she gave me an atlas. On the first page it has a map of the whole world, with a green line traced around the outside margins of the page. The inscription reads "You can go anywhere within these lines."