Postaday for June 14th: The Early Years. Write page three of your autobiography.
knocking over a model ship on table somewhere behind him. Which I find highly suspect considering he was a Navy man at the time, so when exactly did he have the hours to put together a ship, much less the money, considering his weekly pay went entirely to supporting his wife, his brand new son, and, it seems, my voracious diaper appetite? His own fault, if you ask me, giving me so much apple juice!
I kid, of course. Even back then you wouldn’t give a days-old baby apple juice. It would have been wasted on me, if nothing else. Nowadays I love a good apple juice, but on day three I wasn’t self-aware enough to enjoy anything. I still, on that day, had a good threes years of brain growth to go. Unlike horses, who can walk on day one, I couldn’t even roll over.
Indeed, I remember absolutely nothing of that time at all, and can only goes off anecdotes like the one above. So really, who am I to say it wasn’t true? It might as well have been. My parents tell other stories from my youth, although I think they were maybe too sleep deprived themselves in those first several weeks to be able to remember much. I didn’t cry too often. Mostly I just stared at things. I ate what I was fed, required frequent diaper changes, and occasionally gurgled.
There are photographs, of course, of a smushed up, wrinkly thing, all blotchy and unattractive. I look nothing like that now. I mean, I am once again smushed up, wrinkly, blotchy, and unattractive, but in an entirely different way. You’d be hard pressed to recognize me in those old photos. Maybe it was the technology. In November of 1971 even the likes of an Ansel Adams was only taking photos in black and white, after all.
(This is entirely untrue, but I’m writing an autobiography page here, not a history book, the difference being the latter describes what happened and the former describes what I imagined happened. Hence the apple juice quip. I was only three days old, for crying out loud).
At any rate, I was a baby, and stayed that way for a number of weeks, which stretched into months. Those first several days were exciting. A navy man and his navy-retired wife. A little tiny apartment in rural Massachusetts. Winter coming on, and with it, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s. I would see them all before I was even two months old. People ask me why I’m so quick to embrace new things, an early adopter, living on the very prow of progress. I point them to this first week of my life, my tiny fist grasping for but still not even close to coordinated enough to grip my father’s beard.
Which reminds me of another anecdote my parents used to tale at family gatherings and the like. It seems our neighbor had an enormous Great Dane called Winston, and my father thought it would be funny to get a snapshot with me posed on the dog’s back. Yes, back in those days, parents didn’t think twice about a newborn child interacting with a germ-coated dog.
So there’s me, three days old, sitting in a puddle of myself on the back of a hound that would literally outweigh me for the next 12 years. So big was Winston, and so small was I, that they didn’t even have to hold on to me— I was balanced quite well on his sizable rump. I guess they’d left the door open, to let in some cool air since the radiator was going full blast. Did anyone know one of the other nieghbors had a cat? I suppose not. Neither did Winston— so when he saw Mr. Jinx, he took off like a shot, and me right