THE MAKING OF TOM HANKS

THE ACTOR-AND NOW NOVELIST-REFLECTS ON HOW HE GOT HERE, AND THE OTHER LIVES HE MIGHT HAVE LIVED INSTEAD

- CHRIS HEATH

THERE IS A PARTICULAR CIRCUMSTANCE DEEP IN TOM HANKS'S PAST THAT he thinks may explain something significant about the person he is now. One that suggests how, before all of this before everything he would achieve and come to represent in the world, before he had even begun to work out what talents he might have and how he might best use them-he was already well on the way to becoming who he would be.

As a child, several times a year, Hanks would take a long journey on a Greyhound bus, heading to and from the small Northern California town of Red Bluff. He was often alone, and he always sat by the window. In Red Bluff, Hanks would stay with his mother, Janet; after his parents' marriage ruptured when he was 5, he never lived with her, but on holidays he'd visit. And so, from when he was 8 until he was 17, four or so hours each way, he'd take this ride.

Those journeys, they released something within him. Sometimes he read a little, maybe a comic, maybe a book, but mostly he'd stare out into the passing world. He'd watch the broken sine wave of the telephone lines, looping on and on and on for miles, then veering away, then rejoining the bus's path. He'd see a barn, wonder what was on the other side. A house would flash by; he'd imagine who lived in it. Some figures standing outside: What were they doing? A plane up in the clear sky: All those people, where were they going and what were they thinking? The couple in that car as the Greyhound passed, the guy by himself in the truck, that station wagon loaded up with kids in the back, that locomotive on the train tracks...