On the night of September 22, 1968, my parents went to bed, planning on going to the hospital first thing in the morning. My mother's due date was soon, and the young couple were happily prepared to bring their first child into the world. That child, however, had ideas of his own about the timing of the blessed event.
Shortly after midnight, my mother woke up my father and said, "We have to get to the hospital now." And so they got into the car, and my father sped down the steep hillside streets of Worcester, Massachusetts, on the way to Worcester Memorial Hospital. About halfway there, he was stopped by a cop on a motorcycle.
"What's the problem here?" asked the policeman.
"Lady with a baby," replied my father. The cop, looking into the car, quickly confirmed this, and also recognized the face of the driver.
"You're Eddie the cab driver's kid, aren't you?" My grandfather had been a childhood friend of about half the Worcester police force. My father acknowledged this, and the officer turned on his flashers, motioned my father to follow, and gave the car an escort the rest of the way to the hospital.
Once my mother arrived at the hospital, nature and the doctors quickly did their work, and after a relatively straightforward delivery, I first poked my head into the world at 2:10 AM on September 23, 1968. After the initial shock and realization of my situation, I promptly did the most reasonable thing that could be expected under the circumstances: I went back to sleep.
The first few weeks of my life were spent in Worcester, but my parents shortly thereafter moved into a new house in Westborough, about twenty miles away. I learned to walk, talk, and read, the latter becoming one of my favorite pursuits. I quickly developed a need for glasses, and began wearing them at around age four. In 1971, my brother Andrew joined the family, an event about which I was somewhat ambivalent, but then, no one had consulted me on the matter. We had a typical brotherhood, with our share of fights, but there were the good times as well. Many a weekend was spent happily playing together with our stuffed animals.
In 1973, my father accepted a new job which required him to move to the Hartford area, not far from Worcester but still a big enough move to be a major event in the family's history. Fortunately my brother and I were young enough that this was not a major disruption in our lives; we moved in the summer, and I began kindergarten in our new hometown of Coventry, Connecticut.
Coventry, and my parents' neighborhood, was a nice enough place for kids of less than high school age. We had a nice house with about an acre of yard, in a neighborhood with about a hundred similar houses. There were plenty of other families with kids of similar age, so there was never any shortage of friends to visit by walking or biking. The neighborhood was adjacent to several hundred acres of undeveloped woods, which made for many fun days of exploring.
Unfortunately, once I reached adolescence and realized that there was a larger world out there, I also realized that it was almost impossible for me to reach it. Coventry was far enough from the metropolitan hub of Hartford that the buses didn't run out there, and anything interesting was beyond reasonable walking or bicycle range. That didn't stop me from making the occasional bike trip of twenty-five or thirty miles, fueled by willpower and the lack of other transportation possibilities. I was always determined to do as much as I could given the resources at my disposal, which by age twelve included a morning paper route that provided me with a modest independent income.
A major change in my life took place in the summer of 1981, when I was allowed to get contact lenses. Anyone who has gone through school wearing glasses knows what kind of social ostracism can result, and being free of my glasses for the first time in almost ten years really did have a positive effect on my social life. It also taught me some rather ugly object lessons about how much people judge by appearances alone, and this gave me a very cynical attitude towards human nature, which didn't mellow out until after I'd graduated from high school. But since most intelligent teenagers are cynical by nature, I don't think anyone but me really noticed the effect.
Part 2: Adolescence and High School
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