As a young girl, I spent more time outside synagogues than in them.  Services were long, and I always found some excuse to get away.  I remember the Quonset hut where my family went to services when we first moved to Honolulu.  The building looked like a white cylinder half buried in the ground.  I remember borrowed space in a Unitarian church, an elegant old house with woven mats covering hardwood floors.  A weathered tree house sat in the branches of a large tree in the garden.  I’d leave my sandals on the grass and climb the ladder to read Wizard of Oz books.. . . And yet, inexorably, some of my own religion rubbed off on me.  Might that be the way belief works for some people?  Not  a sudden epiphany but a long, slow accumulation of Sabbaths.  No road-to-Damascus conversion but a kind of coin rubbing, in which ritual and repetition begin to reveal the credo underneath.  As I grew older, I was drawn to poetry, and I began to study the haftarah – the weekly selection from the prophets.  As I grew busier, I began to appreciate the time away from the world.  Services became a refuge.  I did not need to rest when I was a child, because I did not work.  I did not want to come inside, because the outside world was still entirely beautiful to me.