Past: My Consciousness Flickers to Life

For some reason, looking through or over the top of wooden crib rails seems to me my earliest memory - when my conscious existence came to life. That crib was located in the small bedroom of Jack and Carole Authenreith - mom & dad. That bedroom was located in the front left corner (looking from the street) of our white, cape-style, 3 bedroom 1 1/2 bath home with pink shutters and matching front door. That white, cape-style house was located just about in the middle of Thoreau Avenue on the right hand side, surrounded by duplicate white, cape-style houses. Oh the builders tried to shake it up a bit and give them different characteristics. Some would have two dormer windows on the roof, others would have covered front porches etc. But all in all, they looked the same, and ours had neither of those - just a plain white, cape-style house with a little cement front porch in the middle that my dad called a stoop - and pink shutters with a matching front door. Thoreau Avenue was located in a little out of the way neighborhood in an area called Firestone Park. All of the streets in my neighborhood were named after poets - like Cooper, Lurie, Lauby, and of course Henry David Thoreau; and all of those streets had little white, cape-style houses. Now, the area known as Firestone Park was located on the south side of Akron - which is located in Ohio, which is located in the United States, North America, planet Earth. There's lots of stories to tell about life in that little white cape-style house, and I'm going to take you there - you'll have to keep watching.