The Story of Dan, Part One
The first thing I remember is my first step. I’ve heard childhood events fade from memory if they happen before age three, but that first step is still as clear as day to me and was corroborated by my mom years later. It was a sunny afternoon in spring, with dust motes swirling in the sunbeams across our living room. She stood me up, held me steady while pointing me towards my dad, and just told me to go. My dad was about three feet away, near the cocktail table (in the 60s all aspiring working-class households had to have one—like a whiskey carafe). I remember exactly how he looked, his arms reaching out to me, luring me into moving. I took those first shaky steps and just fell forward into his arms. Days later I was running through the house and beyond. The locus of the circle that captured my known universe would now start to expand from my bedroom to the house to the neighborhood and beyond.
Mom would read to me every night. My favorite book was Curious George’s Rocket Ride, and I would insist on her reading it to me every night. A broad curiosity about things and my fascination with space and astronomy started pretty early. During one of her endless series of readings from Curious George, Mom was distracted from her reading by Dad asking her a question. I took the book and started reading out loud, as I’d been linking the words she was saying to those printed strings that I saw at the bottom of the page, as she read it to me over and over. Astonished, Mom pulled out another book that she’d been reading to me between CG cycles. I picked it up and started reading that too, only getting stuck on words that were less familiar. My early reading led to another habit of mine—reading the daily newspaper in the living room as I sat Indian style, legs crossed, and rocked back and forth. I was four years old.
Aside: Yes, I would rock in my crib and bang my head against the wall. My dad bolted my crib to the floor after one night when my rocking jammed the crib against the door and he had to remove the pins from the door hinges to get in. I was also a bedwetter and sleepwalker, which is a bad combination. One time I wandered into my parents’ room, and opened the drawer of their dresser, intending to pee into it, sleeping all the way. They caught me just in time.
At that same cocktail table a couple of years later I would endlessly play with my favorite toy, the playmobile (see picture), which was a sort of a complete dashboard with steering wheel, windshield, and plenty of knobs and levers to futz around with. I went at it by the hour, with a faraway look past the plastic covered sofa and rainy Paris painting on the living room wall and imagined going to all the places I’d read about. I would stand at our picture window and look out on the cars coming down the street, and would ask and remember their make, model and year vintage and call them out as they went by. When I was a little bigger, Dad would sit me on his lap while driving on vacation and he would let me take the wheel, almost, and let me shift, which he told me was real and so it was dangerous and endlessly tantalizing. To this day, there’s nothing that matches the feel of freedom and discovery of just taking off in a fast car on a summer night and ending up in some new town, just soaking in the glow of the bars and shops down the main street.
One Sunday night, my parents dragged me and my sister out of our rooms and insisted that we sit with them in front of the TV and watch something special. It was the Beatles on Ed Sullivan in February of 1964. I didn’t understand all the screaming, but that music, at least what I could hear of it, mesmerized me. The driving beat and the shaggy-haired energy called out to me: You are one of us, and the world will be ours. Somehow through that TV, a hand reached out and grabbed me by the shirt and insisted I was part of something bigger, that I was somehow part of the world, had a connection to a generation that would leave a mark (the Beatles were all 15 years older than me, but I felt connected to what was to follow). I asked for a transistor AM/FM radio for Xmas and was glued to the wavelength of pop radio from then on. Later that year, my parents, never reluctant to expose us to the world, took us to see Goldfinger. This was way over our heads. But another indelible impression: a suave loner, threatened by a dangerous world, and moving through it with a cool confidence and sly wit. The irresistible lure of fast women and faster cars was not lost on me either. Me at the most basic juvenile level of wish fulfillment: The Beatles and James Bond.
