It was kind of hit and miss, but it gave us a little bit of a sense of direction. Then my friends and I would try to find each other in the water using the echo-location techniques we’d practiced. It was not an exact science, but still a lot of fun to try and master. I found that I could tell by how loud or soft the noise was how close or far away I was from the wall of the pool. I’d make high pitch noises underwater and close my eyes. This led me to pretend to turn into a dolphin every time I went swimming that summer. In the book a 13-year-old girl with problems adjusting to her new school enters an undersea world through the power of a ring, becomes a dolphin and aids the whales in retaliating against slaughter by whalers. That same year I read another novel by Steve Senn called A Circle in the Sea. From there I would re-enact many of the scenes from the book where Spacebread uncovers a plot to dominate the planet Ralph while she goes in search of her stolen belt buckle. I’d shove a tape into the tape deck and pull down the visor and pretend that I had maps and star charts up on a screen. My mom would be inside the Laundromat doing laundry and I would go out to the old Chevy Nova we had and pretend it was a space ship. It was his adventures that inspired my pretend games of space travel.

I was about 11 years old when I discovered the book Spacebread by Steven Senn about a cat that traveled through space and had all kinds of cool adventures.

The Sand Witch by Steve Senn