“Take Alice’s route as she chases the white rabbit down the hole…” -Juliet and Charles Snape, The Classic Tales Maze Book, page 1

                Tonight I’m at my mother’s house, and my little sibling (who’s not so little—several inches taller than me, for example) took The Classic Tales Maze Book off the shelf. I remember the mazes in this. Or more particularly, I remember the pictures: the giant puppies crouched in the woods, the tables laden with teacups and saucers, the rivers. I remember the stories: Alice in Wonderland and Tom Sawyer and Don Quixote and Gulliver on his travels which I always skipped because I didn’t like it. 
                I remember lying on the floor, book open before me, running my fingers over the oceans and the fields and interlocking paths. Each two-page spread constructs a maze for you to follow along in the main character’s journey. Each spread also has a clever flap that folds back and forth, opening a room or cave you hadn’t seen before. I liked that part, but the paths of the maze confused me. A letter, lying across the path, is meant to block the road. So is the line of a roof if the perspective is drawn so that the path crosses behind the house. The mazes are put together for you to follow a completely uninterrupted line from place to place. As a kid, looking at them, that confused me. I thought you could step over the letter. I thought you probably could go around behind that house, and for that matter, you could cut across these open green fields. I would look in the back of the book to find the solution you were supposed to take, and then look at the pictures again, trying to backsolve why that way was the right way. 
                I liked this book. I fell into it. I was bewildered by it. In its colors and lines, I don’t think I was trying to understand mazes. I was trying to understand the signals and signs by which people say that some paths can’t be walked, and some paths must be.