(He) handed me a copy of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. “In the shade of the house, in the sunshine of the riverbank near the boats, in the shade of the Sal-wood forest, in the shade of the fig tree is where Siddhartha grew up.” Reading that sentence for the first time in the small bedroom I shared with Charlie, it was as if I were reading about myself: In the shade of the house, in the sunshine of the highway near the droning automobiles, in the shade of the pine trees, in the shade of the dead-end street is where Tom Lowe Jr. grew up. Siddhartha and his search for who he was meant to be, it was me on that river, it was me on those banks, and it was me who began to see books as doorways to worlds that could only help me rise in this…