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?