I wish I could say I had a great intellect and an overall view of how I would write it, but that wasn't the case. The way it happened was I was writing longhand in a notebook. On the right side of the page, I was writing in the third person past tense, an aging teacher's composition, and on the left side I was writing notes. He goes up, I go down, I get off. Malachy goes down.
Seesaw hits the ground.
I continued writing like that in the present tense and it fit like a glove. So it was the mechanics of writing that led me to my child's point of view. Now I'm the great hope of the Social Security set. I also don't like all the attitudes and expectations about older people. If you belong to the AARP, you get this bulletin and they are always advertising the music of Lawrence Welk.