A Beginning

[Bloomfield, NJ - February 1, 1970]

I was born in a hospital in Montclair, NJ, on February 1st, 1970, to Martha Ware Williams and William John Williams. My father was a telephone repairman for Bell Telephone at the time, and my mother was a busy housewife, having given birth to my brother Chris in 1967.

We lived on Carteret St., in Bloomfield, NJ, back then. I was taken home to a nice room with choo-choo train wallpaper, I've been told. I don't have memories from the first few years of my life, more like recollections of stories told to me by my parents over the years. I liked sucking my thumb. I liked only two types of baby food: meat and bananas. I was a good little monkey. I also had a fascination with blue fuzzies. Yep, blue fuzzies. I had a very soft multicolored blanket that I loved in a similar manner to the way Linus (of Peanuts fame) loved his blanket, only I took it a step further.

You see, the blanket had squares of many different colors, but there was one color, a cerulean blue, that I especially loved. I would pick at that color, pulling the strands and gathering them into soft little balls that can best be described as "blue fuzzies". How I loved those blue fuzzies. I'd hold them next to my face and coo. They were so soft and blue! I think I may have eaten some of them. I'd fall asleep at night nuzzling a collection of soft blue fuzzies against my face. To this day, there is a specific feeling I get if I am extremely peaceful and comfortable as I fall asleep. It is the blue fuzzy feeling, and there may be nothing in the world better than it.

I should mention that my parents became quite perplexed when they found that a perfectly geometric pattern of holes had mysteriously emerged in my blanket. I imagine that it was a similar feeling to what a farmer experiences when he first stumbles upon a series of crop circles in his cornfield. Something was very strange indeed, some alien force was at work. They shrugged and assumed I must be some kind of savant/freak. At least they tried to comfort themselves with the hope that I would have some savant-like qualities, which might counterbalance this particularly freakish one.

I also remember that I had a big head. It's not like I looked in the mirror and exclaimed, "my god, look at the size of that thing!" No, it wasn't like that. It was just that no article of clothing seemed to be able to fit over it. I can still remember my father trying to pull my pajama top off. It would always get stuck on my head, and I'd end up suspended in the air, swinging helplessly as he tugged futilely on the top in exasperation. It was pretty funny to me actually, and I think we ended up making a game out of it.

I also liked to stand on my head when I was a toddler. We had a little jungle-gym in our backyard, and I'd go outside and hang upside-down by my feet, resting the top of my head on the ground. The world was so interesting from that perspective! I remember staring up at the sky, pretending that up was down, and I was hanging SO high up above a peculiar (cerulean) blue void. I spend a lot of time doing that. It's possible that I may have compressed my neck a bit, but more likely that I merely counteracted the stretching it was getting from the nightly pajama-pulling sessions with my dad.

I remember liking my brother a lot. One of my fondest memories from that time in my life is how we would go play in my dad's phone truck when he came home for lunch. He came home for lunch nearly every day…he really liked seeing my mom. She tells me that when they were first married sometimes she would cry in the morning after he left for work. So they'd eat together and we'd go play in the truck. Man that was fun…one of us would sit in the drivers seat and "drive" while the other one would "repair" one little trinket or another with bits of extra wire and tape. I still remember the smell of that van…old vinyl, WD-40, and electrical tape.