I have a lot of improbably early memories. I was essentially alone until I was five, so I spent more time thinking and less time, you know, laughing and playing than most kids. That helps the early memories stick, I think. There was my brother, who was eight years older, my mother and a woman who looked after me, but very few other adults and no other kids in our neighborhood, mostly on account of our neighborhood was a big state mental hospital.

My father was hired as director of a brand new public booby-hatch when I was about a year old. It was built on a piece of land that was very isolated from the nearby city by geography: a bend in the river. It was very nearly an island (and for you Amityville fans, it was also an ancient Indian burial ground). Our house was on the property, and designed by the same architect to be a matching set. On hot Summer nights, my dreams are lined with salmon and aqua mosaic tiles.

Here's what it looks like today, courtesy Google Earth (do you say "courtesy" when you steal something?):

I think it was smaller then. I definitely remember the central building and the big oval drive, but those outlying buildings are unfamiliar.

My parents tried to send me to nursery school once. I lasted a day. I spent it standing with my back wedged in a corner, staring around the room and alternately scrunching my lips all the way over to the left side of my face and then the all the way over to the right side of my face. Like one of those novelty cat wall clocks. I socialized okay eventually, when I hit school age, but by then it was too late to develop an easy acceptance of humanity. I don't like to be rude, but frankly, you guys really get on my nerves. Always talking when I'm trying to think something.

I'm sure I must've gone places, shopping and visiting and seeing grandma and that, but I don't remember it. All the memories that stuck were of home. Like, one morning, I looked out the livingroom window and the field across the street was full of trailers and horses and dogs and people in English riding costume. Mother saddled our horse and we joined them in a lunatic dash across the marshes, me in front of her in the saddle clutching the horn for dear life (Western saddle, of course). I remembered it as a fox hunt, but Mother said it was just a trial of the dogs.

We went riding often. Once, I remember, to a pumpkin patch at Halloween. We each picked out a pumpkin and climbed back up on the horse, when Polly went nuts, bucked a few times and tore away with us. She must've been stung by a bee, because it was the only time in her whole long life she misbehaved. Mother was really mad at me afterwards because I wouldn't drop my pumpkin through the whole ride, though she kept yelling at me to. Partly, I did it because it was mine, I picked it out and I wanted to keep it. But mostly, the act of dropping one thing and grabbing another under duress was a little complicated for baby me.

I remember the hospital, too. The one next door, I mean. Nice memories. Like going to see my dad, and going to the dining hall for icecream (they had to stop serving pats of butter in the dining hall, because the patients played a game where they flipped butter at the clock with their forks and spoons. It stuck to the wall pretty good, too. Covered it in butter pats. At least, I think that's a real memory and not something I read somewhere).

I remember a few of the patients, too. This was an open sort of nut-hatch for relatively functional crazy people, which was a revolutionary concept then. I was never left alone, but I was often introduced to patients and staff. I particularly remember a schizophrenic midget named Shorty. I knew he wasn't quite like me, and yet he was my size. Fascinating. God apparently was after Shorty, but I didn't know that then.

It's not surprising, what with the nice memories, that I headed for the hospital when I ran away from home. I was mad at Bessie, the woman who took care of me, so I set off down the driveway to seek my fortune. I was toddling pretty good by then, because I think I stood a good chance of making it.

Then came one of those weird, random experiences that unfairly color one's thinking forever afterward: when I got to the end of the drive, I looked left and saw the hospital, I looked right and saw a big black snake coiled up in the sun and probably sound asleep. I hightailed it home, sure I had seen God. Or something very like. My infant theology was pretty vague. I don't think we were churchgoers then, but I had some notion that there was a snake and misbehaving and punishment and things, and I was convinced I had just had a cryptic and terrifying but mystical near miss of some kind.

Huh. I guess Shorty and I had something else in common.