Like this:

From the time I was very young until much later in my life, my mom often asked me if I could remember “Granny Pearson” (who wasn’t really my grandmother) holding me as she sat in her rocking chair on the porch of the Pearson Hotel (actually a boarding house) in my home town of Louisville, Illinois. I never could remember Granny P., but I do remember a very minor event that happened just before we moved from the “hotel” to our first home. I was about three years old at that time (my age in the photo). I’m not really sure why I remember this incident, but I can almost always see it clearly in my mind’s eye—and I can sometimes hear it and occasionally pick up smells as well.

In the memory, my father and mother and I were visiting the empty house where we were about to move. Though new to Mom and Dad, the house was an old one and didn’t have kitchen cabinets, so we were there to do some measurements. I recall that Dad was using a folding rule, and I was “helping” him by using a small plastic protractor. The protractor was brightly colored, but when I play back the memory, the color shifts—sometimes bright red, sometimes bright green; I don’t know why. My sister, by the way, wasn’t in the scene; maybe she was somewhere other than in that very empty kitchen (it had a sink and nothing else) because, unlike what the photo suggests, she was a very energetic, active, rambunctious kid and could never stay in one place for long.

If someone else were telling me the tale of the protractor, she or he would probably say, “You wanted to be just like Daddy.” That may have been the case, but I don’t think so. I was definitely trying to imitate him, but I probably thought we were playing some kind of game—that or performing some sort of weird (but fun) magical ritual. I remember that Dad was moving his folding rule back and forth and up and down in a serious, methodical, linear way and that he kept saying short phrases to Mom, who dutifully wrote each utterance down. Mom probably also asked a hundred questions during the process—since she was talkative (a trait I definitely inherited) and wanted to discuss things, not merely to record them. Dad was not very loquacious, however, so I doubt that any discussion took place. I, unlike Dad, used my protractor rather more freely. I let it run and walk and hop and jump and slide as the spirit moved, and on those rare occasions when the scene has sound, I’m providing a running commentary—in my chirpy three-year-old’s voice—of what’s going on.

The tale of the protractor isn’t actually a story as such; instead, it’s simply a scene with no introduction, no plot, and no denouement. It may, however, provide foreshadowing of other chapters in my life. I think that even though I was only three, it was likely obvious that I was not going to be “just like Daddy.” If so, it was probably also obvious that I would never see the world in quite the same way that Dad did and that my personality would never be very much like his, either. The tale of the protractor does not (to me, anyway) portend an inability to measure up to Dad’s expectations, though; instead, I think it simply shows that even from a very early age, I was noticeably different from him. I’d guess that this is not an uncommon experience.

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