One Boy's Way of Knowing

My parents tell me when I was an infant I didn’t cry in the morning but waited quietly in my crib humming and playing with my toes until my parents arrived. On random Saturday mornings when my father didn’t have to work and my parents wanted to sleep in, I slept in, too. Remarkably compliant, I would look over my shoulder just before I dipped my hand into a forbidden drawer for an ink bottle or some other irresistible object, as if I hoped someone would see me and stop me. My grandfather had never seen anything like this: “Is it possible something’s wrong with this kid, because he doesn’t act like other kids? I’m telling you.” When my younger sister was born—six weeks premature, only ten months after I was born, and nearly dying of pneumonia—she joined me in the small nursery, howling through the night hours. I slept through it all. At age three I closely observed and mimicked my adult models—once stretching out on the sofa with the open newspaper held above me. Another time I packed a suitcase and marched out my grandmother’s front door determined to rescue my father from basic training in San Antonio, Texas, 600 miles away. Well into my third year I would wait in my crib until my younger sister crawled out of her own crib, crawled into mine, and helped me escape. I was, in my parents’ words: “no trouble,” “a dream,” “a piece of cake.”

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