"My father came home every day after work and read books," recalls Norris. "We could play around and make the most terrible din, and he never even seemed to hear us. . . . He was the only one who was allowed to read at the table. He'd eat a whole pie without knowing it. He'd say, 'Is there no pie today?' "

They were an academic and athletic family. George himself competed in track and field for money. Leslie became a fine soccer player who received offers to play professionally. He continued to play soccer and run track into his 30s. But his passion was his words.

Leslie was the boy resident poet of the Norris house. In the summer he liked to lie on his back in the grass with the feel of the earth against his back and the clouds scudding by overhead, plucking stalks of grass from their tubes and chewing on them. "I would look until I would demand to see the motes of the air," he says in the biographical video, "Crossing Borders." "I would look until it was not merely the clouds but the tiniest structures of the rim of the clouds."

He sat cross-legged on the short grass,

Intent, still, staring into a sky

Without clouds until he saw the world

Transformed into its motes,

the visible element

Of his meditation. — Excerpt from "A Blade of Grass"

Years later, Peter Makuck, a professor at East Carolina, would note of Norris, "He sees what he sees because he's ready, because he's always on duty, because he doesn't miss anything."

That includes something as mundane as a wall. Norris had an epiphany at the age of 12. He was walking home alone one hot summer afternoon when he noticed the sandstone walls of the houses he was passing. As he tells it in "Crossing Borders," "I put my finger on the wall and it was rough and I could feel the individual grains, and then I put my hand against the wall and little grains fell to the ground, tiny things, and I suddenly knew that my life was going to be the recognition of solid things like this and making relationships of the real world, of the material world, and that the only way to do that was to have the words that stood for stones and rocks and mountains, and that the rhythms would create the formation of such things, and I was going to do this all my life."