The collected evidence of my first year alive: a birth notice in a long-shuttered Connecticut newspaper; a birth certificate whose vital stats have been typed neatly into each line of the form, though with a rightward slant to the all-capital letters, suggesting that the clerk had rolled the paper into the typewriter at a slight angle; the faded or expired memories of my nine aunts and uncles, my one surviving grandparent, a few old family friends and perhaps a very keen-minded priest; some forty photographs.

The latter were all taken by the same Kodak camera—they are each the size of a baseball card and time (or perhaps just the dullness of the film) has given them all a similar shade, a brownish-green tinge. There are a few exceptions, like a close-up, taken with a flash, of my infant face, which commands the center of the frame like a pink moon hanging alone in darkness.

The photographs are mainly of ceremonies—my baptism (my father, ridiculously young and handsome, seems in wonderful spirits), my first Halloween (I was a sad, fat little clown), my first Christmas. There is a series taken after my baptism in which all of my elders—my grandmother, my great-aunt, my great-grandmother and my father’s parents—are each shown cradling me in their arms. They are all in the same position in my grandmother’s living room, posed dead center in the frame, as if their movements had been blocked by a director. Each of them stands directly beneath my late grandfather’s framed obituary and his FBI seal, which hang above the fireplace, so that each variation of elder-and-child forms the lower extension of a y axis that begins with the framed seal; the x axis is a mantlepiece that stretches beyond the edges of the photograph. The mantelpiece is rich with the bounty of a half-dozen ambitious children: a tangle of medals, baseball trophies, hockey trophies, grade-school ribbons, hand-made greeting cards.

This is still my grandparents’ world, my first world—the shelves of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books; the stacks of Life, TV Guide, Saturday Evening Post; the plastic-shrouded furniture; the sleeping green-glass television; the Andy Williams records. My parents are still just fledgling players in it, and I’m of utterly no consequence, content to be held, a mere object, placidly considering the void.