Me? I'm old enough, I guess. Born in ’39; you do the math.

 

Mom told me, after I’d been in the Navy a few years, that I came about by accident – because Pop had just bought a matched pair of clarinets. And was excited about it, you see.

 

Right. Well, though I remember my early childhood, we won’t go into the Dædalus bit (Portrait of the Artist) where he astounds us with his earliest memory (which was, as I recall, peeing his pants). Suffice it to say, I had a really wonderful childhood. My older brother and sister had terrible ones. My younger sister, a genius, also had a wonderful childhood.

 

Well, that’s that. Now what?

 

No, really; it was wonderful. Pop, Mom, and the four kids – and sometimes Grandma, who was shuffled around between her children. Always showed up with a brand-new penny for each of her grandchildren. Once with New Testaments for each of us. Grandpa had been a Lutheran minister (“Missouri Synod,” I can hear her always adding in a proud voice, as though anything less just didn’t count), and Grandma always hoped we’d get religion.

 

Pop died of leukemia when I was 15. He and I went hunting that Fall after he found out – bow and arrow – and, looking back, I can see that I knew he was going to die, but couldn’t actually grasp what that meant. We saw him quickly turn into an old, weak man for whom we carried a small bottle of powdered sulfur in case he fell and cut himself. He bruised so easily! Back then there was no cure . . . so he offered himself as a guinea pig, undergoing lots of operations that wouldn't help him, but might help someone far down the line.

 

After Pop died – my brother was in his first year at MIT, on a scholarship – Mom mourned, took stock, and matter-of-factly went to work. Her first job was making beds at a motel. Next, she was a nurse’s aide. And somehow she found the energy to go back to college and get a teaching certificate. While this was going on, I was working after school in the machine shop of one of Pop’s old friends. I was at that age when a guy falls in love with any girl who smiles at him, just about. I stayed that age the rest of my life.