The Very Beginning (LE Part 1)

Introduction


My earliest memory is of a mountain. I am in a car. I can hear my mothers voice. She is saying that a cop has caught her for speeding and that he is to close for her to outrun him. I know there are other people in the car as I can hear their voices but all I see are flashing lights and this mountain. I see a winding road that leads up and around it. The next memory is being in a boat, on the mountain, with my mother and someone else. We are going in a stream that leads into the mouth of a whale. Inside the whale is a small town. It is filled with voices. The town has little lights in the windows of the houses. That is my earliest memory. I was about a year old. For whatever reason that moment in my life became a memory. And perhaps, just perhaps, it stayed with me because that is the only moment that I have some aspect of a reflection of my father. Soon after that, as my mom tells the story, my father left us. He apparently was with us in the boat. I don't remember his voice or even hearing it. I never saw my father again.

And so metaphorically my memory of the assent up the mountain of life began.