In fifth grade, I fell head over heels in love with a book, a book written in 1960 as part of the author’s doctoral thesis on listening ability. It was called The Starfire, and every morning my fifth grade teacher, Miss Koller read aloud a chapter. My listening ability grew exponentially as I became smitten with the book’s heroine, 11-year-old Mary Ruth Anderson. Mary Ruth was about my age, shared my last name, had long, dark hair just like mine, wasn’t afraid to say exactly what she thought, and could survive anything.

A synopsis: with her best friends, twin brothers Bobby and Leroy Martin, Mary Ruth helped to build a rocket called the Starfire that would launch her and her friends to the moon and then Mary Ruth and Bobby to Mars via a projector.

(How this was possible was clearly explained on page 9: “Bobby and Leroy had built an 80-foot rocket and collected the data necessary for a space flight of nearly 240,000 miles.” What 11-year-old kid can”t do that?)

HowEVER, a glitch in the projector didn’t jettison Mary Ruth and Bobby from Mars back to the moon but rather to a dangerous planet somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy that was filled with menacing dinosaurs like Triceratopses, Tyrannosaurus Rexes, and Pterodactyls.

Mary Ruth and Bobby battled these dinosaurs, escaped from erupting volcanoes and almost drowned in an ocean that separated them for an alarming amount of time. Bobby was understandably lonely and frightened. Where was his friend, Mary Ruth?

I was frightened, too, especially when Miss Koller read a loud the following thought from Bobby:

When I first heard these words, I thought: “I need to remember this because life is already sometimes a nightmare. I have to hang on.” For a fifth grader, a nightmare can be inconsequential like discovering that your mother made liver for dinner. Or it can be consequential. You are punished for mouthing off to your mother a la Mary Ruth Anderson by being forced to stay upstairs while the rest of your family is downstairs watching the annual airing of “The Wizard of Oz” on CBS. I remember wishing that there was some place other than home — like the moon or Mars.

Of course, the Starfire has a happy ending. Bobby eventually spotted a fire in the distance. It was Mary Ruth, true to form holding her own and when they saw each other, they “looked at each other with delight and began laughing and dancing about together, wildly, as if they had lost their minds.” Meanwhile, Larry managed to get back to earth, fix the projector and was able to fire Mary Ruth and Bobby back home where they were greeted, “tearfully, joyfully, triumphantly into the Martin house” which are the last words in the book. But what about Mary Ruth? Where was the Anderson house? Where were her parents? Her mother? Who greeted her? The story never goes beyond the Martin house.

I will end my story about the Starfire with how it all began. After a doctor’s appointment in 1963 that was worrisome for both me and my mother — I can’t remember exactly what was wrong with me, but it ended up being inconsequential — my mother offered to buy me something for being “such a brave girl.” I pulled her toward the stationery store a half a block away from the doctor’s office where scores of copies of the Starfire were displayed in the front window. My mother purchased a copy for me and later that week, Kenneth Edgar, the author, autographed it:

I was so happy! Now Mary Ruth and her ingenuity, courage and spunk would be with me forever. With her, I would be able to survive anything on earth or any other planet. No matter where in the universe I might be lonely and frightened, I would be able to hold on.