Bright lights, bright lights. That's where I'll begin this story. I'll never really know for sure when I saw them, but they sure were bright. One thing is for sure. Either I actually recall my birth or I remember the big bright lights in my face everhead when my nose was cauterized at a very young age. Maybe that's one of the reasons why my eyes were extremely sensitive to the flash of a camera taking my picture, not to mention once when I looked directly into the sun. Of course, kids do the strangest things, don't they?

I remember being at my grandmother's house one day, and I could hear my mother and her mother chuckling. They were both giving me a sponge bath in the kitchen sink, which resembled a laboratory sink. They must have touched the right spot, because although I didn't realize what was happening, I had an erection. There I was, just standing in the sink, knowing something was up but not really perceiving the reality of it. That must have been quite hilarious for them around the year 1955.

My first day of kindergarten brought some woe to me. Almost three-quarters of the way down the street to the new school, a street cleaner was coming down towards me and frightened me out of my wits. I simply ran like heck all the way back to my house and narrowly slipped behind the garage where no one could touch me. I successfully avoided that awful first day at that school.

Before Aunt Nell got up there in years, she wore these old-style sort of high heels, and I actually thought at that time that her real heel was shaped exactly like the heel of the shoe itself. Imagine that, a foot with a heel protrusion like the shoe itself. On some Sundays, we would stop in and see this aunt (God rest her soul). After raiding our aunt's candy dish, our cousin would allow us to take the bubble gum from the baseball card packs he bought. Our cousin didn't care for bubble gum, so I made sure that I was the first person (out of say four) to have first pick in his stash. Too bad I was full of selfishness way back then. Of course, later on in my life, dentists filled my mouth with silver fillings, not to mention hearing that awful drilling sound.

In the neighborhood where we lived, we siblings started our early years out with a bang. There were two men we got to know pretty well. One I called jerky; the other one I called Walter. When we took our walks, we were hopeful that this guy Jerky would appear or that Walter would be outside hanging over the railing with his tank top on. If we were lucky, we received a nickel or dime from good old Walter as we looked up at him from the sidewalk. He must have guessed that we would be begging as we approached his space, so he just threw the coin down to us and said hello. Jerky was not stationary, but when we got lucky and he passed by us, we panhandled him in our desperate attempt. Sometimes we gleaned a whole quarter. We were just kids that roamed the neighborhood. That was before the rise in city crime about 1958.