4
I FIRST MET EDWIN on August 9, 1943. At the time I was exactly 6 months 3 days old, having been born on February 6, 1943. It is with no desire of thrusting myself forward, but only of presenting the pertinent details of a noteworthy occasion, that I thus intrude my personal history into these pages. With my stated object in mind I may add that we lived next door to the Mullhouses on Benjamin Street (we were 293, they 295), that mama had been waiting all the sunny morning for Mrs. Mullhouse to return from the hospital, and that many people have remarked upon my extraordinary, my truly inspired memory.
As I bumped along the sidewalk under the dark blue shadow of my carriage top, I wiggled my toes delightedly in a warm band of light. The shadows of passing trees rippled over my sunlit legs, and in one corner of the carriage a delicate silky spiderweb sparkled like a jeweled maze. Over the rim of the carriage I saw the dark spars of a telephone pole sailing in the bright blue sky. I also recall a little white cloud, very like a rubber whale I played with in the bathtub. Mama was chattering away in some kind of babytalk that made no sense to me or anyone else and I did my best to drown her out with my pink rattle, on one end of which Tweedledum stood with his arm around Tweedledee. Despite my efforts she managed to communicate to me a sense of intense excitement, as indeed she had been doing all morning long with her fussing and her fidgeting and her endless brushing of my silky locks. Luckily for literary history my senses were immensely alive to the importance of the occasion, that bright August morning.
A sudden stop; a turn to the left; two nasty bumps; and again I was rolling merrily along a sidewalk, but now the blue shadow of the carriage top came down to my ankles, the spiderweb hung limp and gray, smashed by mama’s thumb, and over the carriage rim I saw the familiar top of a bright white door, and over that a triangle of white shingles roofed in red, and over that an endless repetition of white shingles and a piece of window. Another turn, a change from loud concrete to quiet grass, a stop, the gathering arms, and why not skip all that and get to the good part, as Edwin used to say.