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(Op-ed by McGill’s Dan Levitin):

"When I was 8, we lived in a small, dusty Northern California town built around pear and walnut orchards. The town had no library and no bookstore but two stores that sold barbed wire and three that sold liquor. Being 8 in that rural, conservative town meant playing football and getting into fistfights because that's what boys did.

With a 5-foot-tall mother (and a grandmother at 4 foot 10), I didn't get the brawny, muscle-bound genes that many of my classmates did. I was always the loser in the fistfights, and it had been years since anyone chose me to be on their side for school sports. I would have become a bookish, antisocial mama's boy — or worse, some sort of misanthropic sociopath — if it hadn't been for the old custodian's son, a music teacher named Mr. Edie…"