March 1993

Adam,

It's hard for me to remember now how many times people have asked me about my 
life.  I don't understand the curiosity; I don't understand the great 
difference.  My life is mine, it is the only one I have known.  They sometimes 
ask if I like my life, well, I don't know, I have nothing to compare it to.  
When I look at the people around, I must ask myself: what do they think? What 
are they inside? Are they anything like me, or am I really so very different?  
I don't know the answers to these questions.

We all seem to be universally the same, but we are each unique, there is no one 
quite like us anywhere.  That is what makes it so difficult.  There are so many 
assumptions that we make.  How do I know that your interests and aspirations 
are the same as mine, or anyone else's?  I don't.  I just have to assume they 
are, if they are not I don't know where to begin in perceiving you.  We are 
each so different, how can one person truly understand another?  We cannot 
crawl into the mind of another, I wish I could.  There is no way to know.

There are many debates as to whether or not everyone's reality is the same.  
From one view we must say no, each person has a different life experience.  
From another we must say yes, for we all live in the same world.  If the answer 
is no, I must wonder to myself why my reality seems so very different from 
everyone else's.  I realize that my life experience is unique, but it should 
not have affected me so much as to make the difference in me so very apparent.  
If the answer is yes, then I must ask myself why others do not display the same 
perceptions as I do.  If they do have the same reality, they must be much 
better at hiding their reactions to it than I am.

When asked to explain myself, I have a difficult time. Where to start.  What 
makes me, me?  I don't know.  The philosophical question of how much can you 
take away before you are no longer you.  I don't know what makes me who I am.  
I could start an explanation at my childhood.  But that would be brief, so much 
of it is unremembered.  Perhaps it is during the times I do not remember that I 
became myself.  It seems futile to ask anyone to explain themselves, and yet we 
do it.  When do we become ourselves, or are we constantly changing who we are?  
Do you remember who you were at age 6?  You had many of the same thoughts and 
ideas perhaps, but so much has changed since then.  At age 10 you had new and 
different influences, many thoughts and ideas were the same as before, but many 
were different.  How can we judge it?  At any age we must say we are the same 
person, we have the same name, the same body, but are we the same inside?  When 
are we real?

I have pondered these questions for so long, for I am a puzzle solver.  And 
this is a puzzle.  I could explain myself by telling you about my life, with 
the hope of giving you some insight into who I am and why I may do some of the 
things I do.  I do not expect you to care, I do not expect you to understand.  
You do not have to read this.

My earliest memories of my life are when I was three.  I lived with my mother 
in a small apartment near the boardwalk.  I don't remember what it looked like.  
I only remember our neighbor.  He was a young man, to me he seemed very old, 
but he was nineteen or so.  I don't remember his name only that he was very 
nice to me.  He would give me vitamin C tabs so I wouldn't get a cold.  He had 
a stuffed monkey, like a teddy bear.  I thought it was very strange that 
someone so old would still have something like that.

I remember a lot of the time I spent with my father.  He lived very close to 
us.  I would stay with him every other day.  We would do interesting stuff.  He 
once took me to play with rockets.  The kind with the cartridges.  His friend 
Phillip was there.  The sun was very bright.  And the rockets were very loud.  
I still have a picture from that day.  I am sitting next to my dad holding a 
rocket with a strange look on my face. It is hard to describe.  But I did that.  
I didn't like the noise; it was too loud.

I remember bits and pieces of pre-school.  It was a private school attached to 
a Presbyterian church.  Because my grandmother was a teacher there I was often 
there before and after school hours.  I don't remember this, but my grannie 
tells me I did this.  She said when we arrived at the school in the mornings, 
long before anyone else got there, I would take off all my clothes and run 
around until people started showing up.  I do remember my friends, John, the 
closest I ever had to a brother, he was born a few months before me and has 
known me since I arrived.  There was Mara, with long brown hair I always loved, 
my mom always kept my hair very short; her father was a dentist, and they had a 
really big house with a swimming pool.  And Leora, she had red hair and 
freckles, I like her a lot.

I remember the playground the way it was then.  I saw it for many years 
afterward, but I remember it then.  After school got out we would stay and I 
would wander around the rest of the building, exploring.  It had an upstairs 
that was part of the church.  There was a big room with a piano, and a coffee 
maker and little things of sugar on a table.  The walls had pictures of Jesus 
on them.  He was doing different things.  I didn't understand them, because no 
one had ever taught me about him.  I liked that room.  I would play the piano, 
I wasn't supposed to, but I did.  There were lots of rooms that just had tables 
and chairs in them.  I didn't understand what they were for; it seemed like 
there were so many of them. I still don't understand them.  And there were lots 
of cabinets in the hallways.  Some of them were locked, but a lot of them 
weren't.  It was fun to look for stuff in them.  Sometimes there were just 
books or papers that were really boring, but sometimes I found beads or mirrors 
or stuff that I liked.  I liked exploring there alone.

Kindergarten was a very strange experience for me: it makes me wonder.  That 
great and wonderful book "everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten", 
and the fact that my dad once told me that his kindergarten year was what 
really warped him.  I wonder if that really is my problem.  It was a private 
school, my parents originally wanted to send me to only private schools.  It 
had a really tall fence around it, that always made me feel strange, like we 
couldn't get out if we wanted.  It had students up to sixth grade, so a lot of 
the school was much older than me.  I had a teacher who was short and fat and 
mean.  If we brought toys she would take them away and give them back only at 
the end of the day.  We had sections in our classes, like we had in middle 
school.  That was weird.  I was enrolled in tap dancing and ballet classes.  
Those were taught at the school.  But I was taken out of my math section in 
order to attend them.  As a result I was taken out of something else and put 
into a second grade multiplication class.  That teacher was scary.  She was 
tall and big around and wore tight black dresses.  She had a big black beehive, 
and really long red fingernails.  Years later when I saw a movie poster for 
Pink Flamingos, a John Waters movie, it really reminded me of her.  I spent a 
strange year there.  At the end of the year we had a talent show, and my ballet 
class had a recital.  We wore long yellow dresses and danced to "Surry with the 
fringe on top".  My parents were appalled by the whole show.  They thought the 
school was going to turn me into a plastic sit-com child, so they took me out.

I spent a lot of time at my grandmother's house.  Really it was an apartment.  
I liked it there, it didn't change for so many years.  The same green carpet, 
and everything was always in the same place.  I would be there every day before 
and after school, in first and second grade.  We lived in Venice and my parents 
didn't want me to go to the school there, so they used my grannie's address, 
and I went to a much better school.  My friend Mara went to school with me, and 
I went to her house a lot. I liked the school.  It was big and had lots of 
grass, and the teachers were nice.

When I was five, my sister was born.  Up until then I had been an only child, 
and I really liked it that way.  I was there for her birth, it was really neat.  
Everyone was there, or at least it seemed like it.  My sister's father was 
there.  And my mom's best friends.  My friend John was there, because he was 
the son of one of my mother's friends.  And there was a doctor and a mid-wife.  
My mom was really loud.  She woke me up that morning; my sister was born right 
before I had to go to school.  She was very purple, and she had no hair.  But 
after they washed her she was very pink and soft and really small.  I went to 
school that day and told everyone what had happened, I thought it was so neat.

Sometime when I was in first or second grade our house got robbed.  It was 
really weird; we were home.  We were just watching TV.  My sister was in the 
other room asleep.  The door opened and two really big black men came into the 
living room.  They told my mom to get on the floor and they put her jacket over 
her head.  They didn't do anything to me, I guess they thought I was too young 
to be of importance.  Then they went through the house looking for stuff.  I 
think they took the TV and the stereo, I know they took my mom's good fountain 
pen that my dad had gotten for her.  Then they left.  My mom was really scared, 
and my sister's dad was away in Japan, so he couldn't help.  He lived next door 
to us.

The place where that happened was a really neat place to live even though it 
was in a very bad neighborhood.  It was called the Venice Place.  It was a 
courtyard with a few houses and businesses and three restaurants.  I liked it 
there.  In front of us lived Sheldon, he was a potter and had big kilns in the 
yard.  They looked really neat, such big ovens.  My sister's dad lived in the 
basement of the building next to us.  He had his studio there too.  He was a 
sculptor.  There was a French restaurant called Chez Helen, Helen was really 
nice.  She would give my big glasses of sparkling apple cider.  She was big and 
round and friendly.  Next to that was another restaurant, I forget what kind.  
But the guy there would give me onion soup, the good kind with croutons and 
cheese on top.  I knew one of the cooks there, he was a teenager, and really 
nice.  One day we were sitting on the porch in back and we were cutting garlic.  
I cut my finger really badly.  Behind the restaurants there was a fish pond.  
It was big and had lily pads and stuff.  The restaurants had outdoor dining, 
and when no one was looking I would take the silverware off the tables and 
throw them into the pond.  I did that a lot, it was fun.  I remember once they 
drained the pond, and there were hundreds of knives and forks and spoons 
tangled in the pond gunk.  It was kind of funny.  Next to the pond there was 
this big overgrown greenhouse.  There were so many plants and it was really 
hot.  I remember in the summer, buckets of water left standing would breed 
mosquitoes, but I didn't know what they were.  The larvae look like little 
fishes.  I would sit and watch them.

I think the last year we lived there the Universal Life Alliance moved into one 
of the buildings.  It was a strange organization.  I've never been able to 
describe it well.  It was not a church, it was not a cult, it was just a bunch 
of people.  A lot of them were channelers. And some of them were into crystals.  
And some of them just believed in that stuff.  The talker was a channeled 
spirit.  His name was Dr. Peebles.  It was strange to hear him speak.  Someone 
had drawn a picture of what the felt Dr. Peebles looked like and it was hung on 
the wall.  The picture was of an old man with a beard and a very kind face.  It 
was around then that I first remember seeing people's auras.  I'm sure I saw 
them before that, but I don't remember it.  I told my mom and she was very 
happy, she said it was a good thing and not to get scared by it.  She even gave 
me a list of colors and what they meant when I saw them.  The first ghost I 
remember seeing was in that house in the Venice Place.  It was in the corner 
near the door.  I didn't actually see anything, the air in the corner just 
looked really odd, and I knew there was something there.  I went and told my 
mom that I had seen it and that it seemed friendly. She said it was just a 
house ghost and if I didn't bother it, it wouldn't bother me.

Gabriella Lowhar