February 2012
6 posts
1976: Cherchez la Femme
Around this time I was a guinea pig for my aunt, who was an elementary school English teacher. My aunt is a wonderful, ambitious woman who, in the course of her life, has been a teacher, a lawyer and a writer; in her later years, she adopted a child from Kazakhstan. She wasn’t a teacher for very long, but one of her lasting projects from that period was me: she taught me to read, at age...
1975: The Big Ship
This is a blank year, one devoid of memory. I’ve gone through the few photographs from ‘75 (a very unchronicled year, maybe reflecting the chaos of a move and my parents becoming overwhelmed with work—-my dad, as a sandwich delivery driver; my mother, getting her bachelor’s degree) and nothing has rung out from them. Apparently I was in a daycare sometimes,...
1974: When I Get to the Border
My earliest memory is of an Easter egg hunt, held at my aunt and uncle’s house in Hamden, Connecticut. So, April 14, 1974. It’s odd to know exactly the point in time where one’s memory begins; it’s convenient for me that it was a holiday.
It’s the slightest, most evanescent of memories, and it’s a compromised one, as three photographs survive from that morning,...