On a clear day, you can see forever--depending on where you sit

Flying makes me a little claustrophobic, so it may come as a surprise that I insist on having a window seat. If I can look outside, my world isn’t so compressed. I can stare at the farms, houses, parking lots, power plants, rivers, and geological formations indefinitely. I never tire of it. In fact, when I choose my own seat, I try to place myself several rows behind the wing so my view is not obstructed.

Growing up, I was the third child of four, all born one year apart. When we traveled by car, I always had to sit in the back seat, in the middle. My parents decided these things via a birth-order formula. My sister, the eldest, got to have a window. My brother, the next in line, got a window seat. My younger brother sat in the front with my parents. Done deal. I got the middle, where I was too short to see over the front seat and blocked from seeing out of either side window.

My sister would shove her hip as far to the center of the back seat as she could. This was an intentionally malicious behavior intended to rob me of as much back-seat real estate as possible—just for the hell of it. My older brother, wanting to gain favor with the power player sibling, would obstruct my view of the window. He knew it made me frustrated and claustrophobic, and therein lay the satisfaction.

I hated the long, long drives of family vacations.

When I decided to read books on those trips, my brother and sister would continually pass things back and forth to each other so they could put their arms and hands in front of my face as frequently as possible. My parents never intervened; they believed that I just needed to learn to either stick up for myself or to not give my siblings the satisfaction of seeing my rage.

My mother denies any of this ever happened.