Lately I’ve been reading a lot of board books. You know, the square-ish kind with thick, cardboard pages. Goodnight, Moon and Bert’s Bedtime Story and Brown Bear, Brown Bear. I read them aloud, of course, and Leo and Charlie take turns (more or less) turning the pages. Very often, they turn two or three or five pages at once–sometimes on purpose, when the pace of the story needs some pick-up, and often by accident, when enthusiasm to see what happens next overcomes finger dexterity. In those latter instances, we find ourselves suddenly on the wrong page, a step ahead of where the story should be. We pause. I say, “We skipped a page!” and back we go to rescue the overlooked piece of the rhyme or plot turn.

I have such a strong memory of this phenomenon: skipping a page. The visceral feeling of suddenly landing where you did not expect to land. You see, we readers are participant storytellers. We understand the build of a story as well as any writer; the story operates in concert with our expectations–meeting them, surprising them convincingly, or surprising them wrongly, terribly wrongly–as when a page is simply skipped.

So strong is my memory of this, that I came back to it at this juncture in my life without realizing that it really doesn’t happen to me anymore in my own reading. I had to stop and think about this; I no longer accidentally skip a page–or very rarely. Well, come to think of it, I suppose there have been those moments when the line of text on the following page did not sensically flow from the preceeding page. So it does happen as an adult, but not five, six times a day. And yet I know exactly what has happened, as if I myself were one or two or three just yesterday and not some decades back.

There are other things like this, stuff we learn to navigate, only to outgrow: Stepping on the heel of our own shoe. Falling over onto flat palms. (Remember the sting?) The heaviness of jeans logged with wet sand. Bringing a piece of cheese up to your mouth and popping it in, only to discover that the cheese has tumbled away and you are popping in nothing. (“Goodnight Nobody.”) The pleasure of being able to accurately identify your own nose and head and ears and belly. And how LONG an hour can be, filled with so many different books and games and activities and maybe a snack, too.

This is what writing gives back to you, and children, too: attention to detail, delight in detail, and yes, sometimes, frustration with detail. A genuine love affair with the minutiae that, in the end, may be all there really is, though we shift our investments to theories and overviews and goals, to large organizing principles that claim to move and sort the details.

Story makes that claim, too, I suppose. I am in the process of mapping a book I wrote–first draft–in seven weeks. Now I am imposing order, logic, a train of motion. But I think it’s important to remember the surprise of skipping a page, the close-up view of the sidewalk when suddenly you’re horizontal and your hands sting, the world of the story that is made up of invisible pieces of cheese that leave your mouth empty and wondering.