I had not seen them for 25 years when my sister mailed me our mass of family slides, comprising over 1,000 images of our parents and us (upon our arrivals) from the late 1950s through the late 1970s. Making what turned out to be my final use of the always-aggravating Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 slide scanner I digitized all the slides and have shared them as appropriate. Many of these images remain fresh in my mind having not seen them for so long, others are kind of puzzling, and a large quantity of them are as boring as ever.

I learned to walk in Accra, Ghana, and these two slides capture some of those first steps.

Walking

Walking

I have no memory of these days but it is sort of amusing to compare the idyllic scene in those images with pictures of the kids next door.

Here is the scene just down the street from where I learned to walk:

Neighbors

Neighbors

Earth is a fascinating place. Such different lives and experiences, such different childhoods and days.

Parade

My mother once told me that the first words I spoke were “TOO HOT!” Temperatures in Accra regularly hit 120° in the shade, and on just such a day as that she put me in a stroller and took us out for a walk. She could hardly believe it when I barked “TOO HOT!” At first she thought I just coughed or made some other baby-gurgle noise. In fact my infant self had summoned the necessary words to articulate my feelings. It was hot. Too hot. So we went back inside.

I was apparently a happy baby in Ghana, for my baby book alleges that “He smiled and laughed very early and was particularly delighted when Diane played with him. They could amuse each other for long periods giggling and screaming.” On page 23 I learn that I “had a number of disorders common among white children in the tropics (respiratory infections, skin disorders, gastro-intestinal troubles) …”

With our access to the Army hospitals and medical staff we probably never paid a visit to Native Doctor Kibi Odumasi Koblah Kai:

Native Doctor Kibi Odumasi Koblah Kai

I don’t know why we would not trust this doctor, though. This person was a “REAL DOCTOR WHO CURES ALL KINDS OF SICKNESS” and whose charms “NO EVIL CAN STAND”. How could we go wrong?

When I was nearly 2 years an Army doctor announced that I might need a spinal tap. I was flown to Germany for this, and therein lies my earliest living memory: Flying in a jet over the Sahara I saw fires burning at the Tuareg encampments in Algeria. It was morning, and the sunlight streaked across the sand from Libya in the east. I remember the endless waves of sand, the shadows cast by the hillcrests, the bold sunlight, and the fires. My mother held open her arms and said “It’s beautiful!” though in my inelocute baby mind I heard only a verbal blob.

No spinal tap was performed, and no mention of this incident appears in my baby book. Numerous incidents from my infancy go unmentioned in that book. My mother once said that she regretted not filling more pages but that she must have been tired of the baby book detail after writing what seemed like a novel for my sister, who was born 5 years earlier.