I was nineteen and in Europe when the tenement apartment I’d grown up in burned down.

We open the door to my mother’s car, an Audi 5000, perched precariously on the side of one of Yonkers’ steep hills

We stood outside the dilapidated picket fence and shaded our eyes, casting our gazes across the grassy pasture of old man Buhler’s farmland.

Climbing Jacob's Ladder is a half-forgotten idiom for the ascent to heaven or a path out of adversity.

We didn’t fit in where I grew up. Unlike all our neighbours, my parents were cash poor and worked in manual jobs.

Our home was in a rural area on seven acres of land, one acre of it cleared for our yard.

You’re not in the club anymore,” Jimmy decreed on the first day of fifth grade. Surely, he was joking. He had to be joking.

With my younger sister always vying for our parents’ attention and affection, the walks I took with my father to visit friends and customers

My sister, Nancy, was my first playmate and is my oldest friend. We are the only ones left that remember us as children.

I am running to my father’s side because he has called me.

I decided early on that the world was a terrible place. Oh yes, it was beautiful, marvelous and mysterious, but it was also terrible.

Some of my Mom’s belongings migrated to the new place and as years passed, I discovered what she left behind.

I asked my mom why Butch despised me--was it just because I was gay? No, Mom said, there’s more to it than that

Anyone alive in the 70s will remember stuffed monkeys made from tube socks

It was 1963. A blizzard blew across the grass outside the married quarters where we lived in RAF St Athan.

The first among all their creatures to be acquired, and ever primus inter pares in his father’s affections, was Bird, the Burrowing Owl

Aunt Jean would read popular psychology books on the #50 trolley as it bounced down Fourth Street in fits and starts toward Passyunk Avenue.

We’d hollow out rock hard swedes with sharp knives. When we lit the stump of a candle inside them, the smell of singed swede was beguiling.

In 1975, my family emigrated from England to Australia. I escaped from a cold, dank, inner-city London to the bright sunshine of Perth.

May 3rd, 1971. We're having a party. I’m six years old, and my parents still speak to one another.