Before my beginning when NASA created space and the moon, the moon was a formless void and darkness shadowed the depths of the room, while a wind from the air conditioner swept over the face of the concrete floor. That was the first day. Then NASA said, "Let there be light" and thousands of watts of incandescence blazed through the empty studio. And NASA saw that the light was good; and NASA separated the light from the darkness. NASA called the light "site specific" and the darkness it called "off camera." And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

I was born at 4:37 in the morning on August 3rd, 1978 at a hospital in Lansing, Michigan. An hour later, as we returned to what would become home along the sinuous concrete curves of Interstate 69, a volcano erupted beneath the state's capital.

I cannot stress enough what an extraordinary event had occurred. First, to say that volcanic eruptions are rare events in mid-Michigan so completely falls short of the point as to be laughable. In fact, the last time a volcanic eruption of any magnitude took place in Michigan, the place itself did not exist in the contemporary sense, as the glaciers were not to carve out the Great Lakes for millions of years, and the land itself had only recently emerged from the Atlantic ocean which, at that point, was pretty young itself.

Compound with this the limited nature of the eruption itself. It was a major eruption, boiling frogs in the mid-Michigan fens and seeping acid and tar into the upper reaches of the Grant River, and flooding the sewers and pipes below Lansing itself. How curious, then, that the whole infrastructure of the city was not damaged in the least, that the flow limited itself to the limestone chambers and steel holding tanks, starting the long road to gneiss all over again. It was a very Mauna Loa style event, and hadn't occurred before, and hasn't occurred again since.

During first grade we went over to Barb's classroom and she read us A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. This was the third book I became obsessed with, after The Tyger Voyage and Goodnight Moon (though The Little Engine That Could follow somewhat at a distance). The story induced terror and exercised imagination unlike any story I'd encountered before. Now I wanted to write my own stories with red-eyed monsters and abducted teenagers. I composed a novel, twenty-pages long, of maybe two hundred words with illustrations. I told my friend Andy about it. I called the story, The Danger of the Doorbell.

At about the same time, we started a Very Special science project. We got caterpillars and cared for them in little jars, feeding them leaves, watching them devour and grow fat. This part of the procedure bored me, generally speaking. Sometime during the month of May the caterpillars formed they crusty chrysalises. I noticed that, for all its glossy sheen and rocklike texture, there was something brittle and fragile about the chrysalis. It still smelled like bug, and if I knelt at the bottom of the tank, so that the chrysalis was positioned between myself and the light, the structure seemed almost translucent. A brown shell, tapering, light black dashes across its surface. Six days later, of course, the butterflies struggled through and crawled out, and we let them go outside. They burst forth in an explosion, and moved up and out toward the sky. For one moment, it was pure joy, for they were dense enough to be an flickering pound sign, a cloud of orange and black. But then they diffused and moved off and away. My caterpillar had left me. Rejecting this, I ran out, followed the butterflies. Many of the kids were at my heels, but I was in tears, or close to it. I regretted the buterflies, the chrysalis. I wanted to have a caterpillar because a caterpillar wouldn't leave me. A caterpillar would sit on my thumb and eat the leaves I fed him. But what's a boy to do with a caterpillar who needs leaves to live, but leaves will make a butterfly who wants to leave the boy? Down at the stream, three boys and two girls found a couple of our butterflies. I claimed that one was mine, though most likely I was wrong. I thought of catching it, of taking it home with me. Somehow, though, I knew this would be cruel. We returned to the school, and my feet felt tight in my shoes.

Alan worked at General Motors and some time during the late eighties they moved away from this rather spectacular house to a much less interesting one in Swartz Creek. But we started seeing them more frequently, and along the way they invited us to spend a weekend at their cottage in northern Michigan. This cottage was less modernized, more picturesque and antique than my Uncle Dick's cottage at Higgins Lake. But it was lovely, and the stairs creaked and climbed to a broad hallway on the second floor with two small bedrooms off to either side. I slept in one with my brother. I think Caitlin slept in the other. There were two bedrooms downstairs, one for Alan and Cathy and one for my parents. In the morning, I might creep down the stairs and fine the whole place gray and cool in the morning. This was as oceanic and vast as I might ever need, I felt. Sometimes, sitting on the dock and watching the fish slip by, minnows that became carp-tinted by the rising sun, and old barge with a grainy seadog rolled along. He was a total cliche, parrot on his shoulder, greasy polka-dot bandanna wrapped around his head, knotty beard and pipe clinched tight in the teeth. "Arfogle bansapft claptogg zazag," he said.
"What?" I asked.
"Zagag zagag!" said the parrot. And the man sailed along.

It was a warning, I knew. A warning about Disposal Plant and the water. But I didn't speak the language.
So I only knew in the most limited way.

The cottage was all connected on the first floor around the stairway. The living room opened into dining area which opened into the kitchen which opened into a hall that led to the living room. There was a large backyard with spruce trees sticking their heads up to the sky, and a paved road behind that that led to the highway. All of the cottages ran up and down along the shore. I made friends with some of the kids in adjacent cottages. We went fishing a lot, and for awhile, I was fascinated with fishing rods and reels. I'd asked for a fishing pole for my next birthday.

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