In the evenings, when things settled down, my mother and grandmother would usually sit out on the front porch after dinner, while my two younger brothers and I were still running around out in the yard playing. It was near the beginning of the summer of 1963, just after I finished first grade, and for the first few weeks we stayed with my grandparents, until my mother could find a job and put together enough to rent a house right up the street from them. My parents separated just before I turned seven years old, and my mother loaded my two younger brothers and me into our old station wagon and took us several states away to be closer to her parents.

The events happened pretty much as described, though I have embellished some of the details – after all, this occurred when I was much younger, and I can’t remember everything precisely as it happened.