My Life - Starting Out

D Vautier
3-2013
updt 3-20

My grandfather on my mother’s side left two things: a bunch of memories which only existed in my mom's mind's eye and the other thing was an article.  That’s what I know about him other than he was my grandfather and I have some of his DNA and mom just about worshiped him, even though he was probably the only one she ever worshiped.  I can imagine right now in a far distant future some obscure relation of mine uncovering something about me.  Oh Dear!  It isn’t enough to say that all of us melt softly into the fabric of history like so many before us have and so many of us will but whatever we attempt to leave behind does really become part of a cosmic fabric I think that extends into the future.  And that's all we have.

I don’t know when it really started for me, this life thing, other than the official October 15, 1941.  The ancients said that baby boys get “insouled” some time around three months in the womb and baby girls naturally some time later.  Religious belief sees life beginning at the moment of conception which works OK for me.  But “insouling” seems to suggest somehow the beginning of constant consciousness, which in my case did not really start until I was quite a bit older and I don’t know what I was doing before then, maybe I was an "evolving" soul or a soul under slow development or just a late soul.

But my consistent conscious life seems to have begun much later like way way after birth when I began to put together a solid trail of existence around six or so.  Before that I don’t know exactly who I was or where I was or anything if you consider being aware in a connected kind of way like living from day to day.  It reminds me of the replicants in Blade Runner, robots without memories, except for just the implanted memories, and I certainly don’t remember any spiders crawling up the wall so I don't think I’m a replicant.

Being a late 1941 war baby should have brought to my young mind a wealth of great events going on at the end of that decade but I don't recall anything.  Instead all I do know are little flickers and glimpses of episodes and things that didn’t matter much.  I do remember some things but it's hard to say why because they were not that exciting or memorable or traumatic.  You’re supposed to remember traumatic big stuff.  I didn’t.  Then of course there is the haunting problem of suggestion.  My brothers say “Remember the time you stepped on that broken glass bottle and there was blood all over the place!”  I don’t remember any of this.

But I do remember the horse.  Judging by that look on my face I was not aware of much more.

But my earliest memory may have been of my uncle shooting moles.  What’s so exciting about shooting moles anyway?  We had these two large tracts of river-bottom farmland on the Nooksack River outside of Bellingham near Everson Washington.  I have been generously briefed by my brothers about many of the things that happened to our family during my early life but these are things I just do not remember.

Tres partes

Caesar began his Gallic war narrative with “ Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres” so in a way it fits me.  I seem to have three periods in my life, and it doesn’t have much to do with length of time.

The First Part