I was 16 when a relentlessly nosy high school counselor told me: "You could be anything. You could be a nuclear physicist." I realized this was the greatest thing he could think of, and how sad that was. I replied:"Then I wish some BOY had gotten my brain. I don't want to be that." It was not just the 1950s expectation that only boys could be scientists, I think, but my generally low opinion of boys brains.
"Then what would you like to do?" this glutton for punishment asked. "I would like to be a monk in a monastery who illuminates manuscripts and sends them out into the world anonymously and never knows what happens to them." I replied. It was the only thing I could think of that appealed to me. I also knew that it would make him very uncomfortable.
Pictures of my first two years of life are black and white of course. But there is no color in them at all. No toys, no soft fabrics, no books or pictures, no love. In one photo I am standing, sturdy and cheerful in a diaper, in a barren crib like the ones you see in photos of destitute eastern European orphanages. I know, from being told, that at night I was tied by the feet to the bars of that crib because at 9 months I was able to climb over the bars, fall to the floor, and run away. There is one picture of a toy. I am sitting on my father's lap on my first birthday rather like one of his hunting trophy pictures and beside me is a stiff white stuffed Easter rabbit larger than me.
I told my first memory to my mother when I was 4. "I am in a dark place but up above me are tiny points of light like stars. When I turn my head to the right there is a round window with a white light and I try to reach it but I can't and I am screaming/crying." My mother looked shocked, not a common look for her, and after a bit said rather suspiciously, "I can't believe you remember that. You had a wicker baby buggy with little round windows in the hood so the mother could check on the baby. You were never in it after you were 9 or 10 months old because you started walking. You couldn't sit up in it because you were strapped down on your back to keep you from climbing out." She showed me a picture of it which I still have. The torture machine.
My second memory is a brief one. A rainy night, artificially lit kitchen, father coming home with some grocery items. A Lea and Perrins' Worcestershire sauce bottle wrapped in tan paper with red string around the neck perhaps, or a printed red line. The paper was opened and I was allowed to hold the circular glass stopper with a ground glass stem. It was beautiful. The first thing I remember thinking was beautiful.
My third memory was my second Easter - always near my birthdays - I was sitting on the floor with a basket of colored eggs. My father sat down on a brown tweedy patterned daybed (called a daveno I think) that sat between two doorways against the wall. My mother was standing in the doorway to my right. I wanted to play with the eggs and discovering that they rolled I sent one toward my father. It rolled askew of course and bumped into the daveno. My father said:"Take those away from her before she ruins them, those are perfectly good eggs." My mother said, "they're hers, let her do what she wants with them." I thought - "that's right. If it is mine I can do as I want with it. She is right, he is wrong." Are all of our future moral judgments based on what we perceive as benefiting, in the long run, ourselves?

Can I do one per day? Hmmm. They fly in and out so fast and a computer isn't always nearby. Notebook?
Start with this one. Two heroin junkies were stoup-sitting one day and the Yoga teacher one is telling his friend about scientific study he read that explains how one can evaluate mental health by watching someone walk.
The two friends then started analyzing passers-by. One day a girl walks by who has it all. Not only attractive, she has the perfect walk: firm, graceful, not too fast, not too slow, confident. They decided to meet her and evaluate their findings.
Both of these men are above average looks, and very above average intelligence. They introduce themselves, chat up and young woman and get to know her. Their conclusion: "She was completely crazy - and NOT in a good way!"

Starting life with no connections, no home-base, little family and zero resources, I instinctively leaned to scavenge whatever information and items that might be useful. Children and animals are remarkably resourceful that way. Whether it was a wistful hint that I wished I had a home or the thrilling discovery that I could escape high school, where I was bored and frightened into fugue states and obsessive writing of bad poetry, and proceed directly to an institution of higher (I hoped) learning. I taught myself to seize the moment, shape it, and act on it quickly and relentlessly.

To an observer in space I might have looked passive, reacting rather than acting; "going with the flow", but I was choosing carefully from the dumpster bin before me. Offered a full scholarship to a rather well-thought-of private college, I turned it down when the offer included supervision by the offerer, a particularly insistent counselor who was "studying" me for his own advanced degree. I knew which meat was poisoned. Unless it involved emotions. That was a separate thread entirely.

Realizing that no one knows I am here. Free at last. I stopped writing for two reasons: (1) fear that no one would read what I wrote and (2) afraid to write down what came to me for fear someone would read it.

My first censorship happened when I was three or four. I was sitting on the toilet in the little-used second bathroom. My mother was cleaning - we didn't have a maid yet - feeling the euphoria of having had a very satisfactory bowel movement I said, "Momma, sometimes when you're on the toilet, don't you just feel like you can do just about anything?" The look on my mother's face told me that there were some things one did not say and that I had better learn them quickly.
I have experienced the same feeling that I had better not let anyone know what I was thinking many times since then. In college a rhyme/song popped into my head one day and I named it "Delicatessen Man" in honor of some of the raunchier songs of Bessie Smith. With lines like, "he's nothin' but greasy meat, but he's so sweet" and "crumbs of egg-yolk up his nose, peanut butter between his toes" it was clear that this was one of "those things you never tell anyone" and it haunted me for weeks like a hit-and-run accident or some other great and dangerous lie.

At this same time I was taking a 17th century English poets class and which demanded a term paper. I proposed comparing the sonnets of John Donne to classic 12-bar blues stanzas in some arcane way that had occurred to me and once again saw my mother's look on the face of my very very important and crusty professor. I really felt that Donne would have liked my idea. HE had a sense of humor, and the themes of love and loss and death fit the blues to a T. I quit the class and, I realize now, I pretty much quit writing.

There were, in my 20's and 30's many letters in the form of a diary of events that went back and forth between myself and friends at the time. Happily these are mainly destroyed. Then there were dream journals in my 40's and 50's. Ditto.

Now there are photos and a blank putatively limitless slate to write on. What shall I say?

Starting Out

Have been putting this off for a long time. Suddenly the social network sites are unappealing - Everyone posts. Few read, including myself. Wanting to go where someone interested can find me when they wish. Not part of the fish-wrapper.