Identity

I’ve written a book that just came out,

and as I held it in my hands last night after reading a few pages, I felt the current of all my sixty-nine years flowing between those covers.

How can that be? There are so many mysteries.

I can remember when I was three, sitting in the little sandbox in the courtyard of our apartment building, a few days after having my tonsils out, and starting to bleed from the throat.

Mother rushed me to the hospital, where the doctor waited with a gurney he set me on, then ran me down the halls to a room where he cauterized, that is, burned, the wound, while I screamed and Daddy held me.

All the while, I was not really that three year-old, but someone watching the whole scene –

the same someone who is watching now as I hold this pen and write these words