One evening in 1980, a friend and I were chatting on a sofa. She turned to me and said, "Someone told me something about you that I have difficulty believing." "Oh?" I responded."What's that?" "She said you used to be a recluse," my friend related. "I find it hard to believe you were ever a recluse." I said, briefly, I was housebound with agoraphobia for several years, but things are fine now. I had, indeed, come a long way from being the teen-aged...