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I was blessed with a very sweet mother. When we went to the beach, we delighted in collecting seashells and showing them to each other.
Every article or book I write is a seashell I show to my readers. Look what I found!
My father was a very good husband and passionate about his work as a nuclear physicist. But being rather full of himself, he had difficulty seeing his sons. He took pride in speaking to us as equals, but in doing so, he denied generational difference. In college, I became fascinated by the theories of developmental psychology. They offered confirmation that there is, indeed, a difference between children and adults.
In elementary school the girls played four square and the boys played baseball. I didn’t like baseball and wasn’t good at it either. I spent my time near the swings with a magnet, mining iron filings out of the sand until I had a bottle of pure black sand. It was like an “alchemical” process of extracting the pure iron filings from the raw dirty sand—an attempt at rescuing something sacred lost in the profane.
In high school, after class, I would pack up my rock hammer, ride my bicycle out on the country roads, and break up boulders along the way in search of 20-million-year-old marine fossils—clams, snails, worm tubes, and sand dollars. While fossil hunting, I thought about Darwin’s evolutionary theory and had two recurring fantasies. One was that I was going to break open a rock and find a little animal still quivering with life—rather like a bit of my own childhood vitality and creativity still alive but somehow trapped in the neurotic matrix of stone. The other fantasy was that I would find a fossil so big and so important that I would need the assistance of a paleontologist from the university to help me extract it from the rock. Putting the two fantasies together, I needed an expert to help me liberate a bit of my own aliveness trapped within.
When I was 21, I found an idea (a seashell) that fascinated me: the representation of the mout