first grader with a huge mess of curls, respectable grades in reading and arithmetic, a beagle puppy, a telescope and compass and a secret clubhouse in the backyard.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" I had been asking her recently, and her answers had been, in order, (each blossoming for about a week before wilting): a magician or "girl wizard;" a mineralogist digging for gold nuggets in Pennsylvania while living with her friend Brenya at Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater; "a kitten trainer;" a turtle rescuer; and, most recently, a paleontologist so that she might unearth a specimen of the gigantic therapod dinosaur Spinosaurus to replace the only complete set of bones of the creature ever discovered, those having been destroyed in a British bombing raidon Munich in April, 1944.

So that was what it was like to be precisely seven years old.

At the White House, now, Barack Obama was going to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a dozen heroes and heroines -- dead and living, American and alien -- of medicine, letters, civil rights, music, astronautics, the judiciary, diplomacy and basketball.

The recipients, their designees and their descendants were introduced and seated. Among them were: Toni Morrison, the writer; John Glenn, the astronaut; Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state; an epidemiologist who helped to eradicate smallpox; a Polish diplomat who brought to Franklin Roosevelt proof of Hitler's death camps; John Paul Stevens, the former Supreme Court justice, and the widow of Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi, the University of Edmonton professor who, as