Blogging started for me as a venue for writing a memoir, of sorts. I’ve spent more time lately on other things, but the memoir is still important to me. So, here is how it starts.

I have only one memory from before I was three years old. I was in a crib, it is night, and I see the light under the door from the hallway — and I hear voices. My mother, who is just getting home from something, greeting my father, who must have been staying home with me, since I never had babysitters until several years later, and not often even then.

As a toddler, hearing my mother’s voice, I feel…tense. I feel that she’s going to come in and find that I’m not asleep yet, and I will be in trouble. Now, how much of that is a real memory and how much of it is tacked on through years of other experiences? There is no way to know the answer to that. And I don’t think it really matters. Feeling that I need to be careful, that I’m probably going to be in trouble at any moment, and possibly for reasons that I did not predict, or that don’t make much sense — this is the defining condition of my entire childhood.