To begin...

What is this? It’s a series of collected memories. A series of vignettes, stitched together by the larger narrative of my life. Earliest, early and recent. It began as a small experiment, one to test my memory. How far back could I remember? The answer to that question is quite far. I remember as far back as two years of age, thereabouts, maybe earlier. I wrote them down. I carried on, trying to keep in sequence.

Once I began, they began to spill out, tumbling forth faster than I could manage. I dropped threads, I retraced my steps to pick them up, and then I carried on again.

They became more complete in the ensuing years, more complex.

Reliving those early middle years, those most formative years when the child grows into the adult, where one falls in love, fails therein, and tries again, and fails again, was the hardest. I was growing up. So were my friends. They moved on, moved away.

As hard as it was to grow up, it was harder still to relive those memories because I see now what might have been, what I might have done, maybe what I should have done, and didn’t. Would the ensuing years have been different if we had done things differently? Yes, of course they would have. Would they have been better? Maybe, but there’s no certainty one way or the other. So, there should be no regrets. Had I done what I think I ought to have done, I’d have done it, and not what I did do, and there’s no going back. These memories are what made me who I am, for better or worse. So, here they are, as I collected them, my life, from carefree and worrisome boy, to uncertain child, to frustrated youth, and beyond.

And so, just as David Copperfield begins, “WHETHER I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born…”

…on December 19, 1964.