"But I was only eight, so I settled for something with a little less depth. After I had mastered the handwriting exercises, I went straight to the notebook and started my first novel. It was called The Adventures of Harry and Henry, and featured two ants who boasted more ambition than most people I have met to this day. They left home to make their own way, they built their own house, they even started their own detective agency. These ants did it all.
"And they taught me all I needed to know. Because as far as I could see, the ants out in the garden next to my house couldn't talk. But Harry and Henry did. The real ants spent most of their time just milling around on a little pile of churned up sand; on the written page they encountered dangerous snakes, followed footprints with tiny magnifying glasses, and jailed the neighborhood squirrel for stealing the missing nuts.
"You see, I had an active imagination, and I found out, with the help of the ants, that the one accessible place where anything is possible is at a desk. With paper, and a pen. Anything can happen.
"That stuck with me, and as I grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, among the graves of the nineteenth century all-star authors team (Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson), I never passed up the chance to pick up a story, or to write one of my own. Through high school, through my education at Trinity College in Hartford, into my independent life, I never let that go. The pen has been replaced by a keyboard, but the imagination hasn't changed.
"As for 'Traffic,' here is a story about people needing other people. Survival of the fittest, depend on ourselves, trust no-one, those are chunks of advice I just don't buy. Nobody is superman, nobody can do it all by themselves; there is always a time when we need a push to get us where we want to go. We need a hero to spark us up, put us on top of our cars, give us a hand to lead the way from the horror of stagnation or defeat into contentment, even if it's only for a few minutes."