I don’t have a lot of memories of the time before I was five. I remember lying on the floor in, I think, the living room, having just found what appeared to be some sort of gelatinous excreta, presumably from the cat. This was the first time I had ever encountered such a thing, and I found it to be bewildering, like finding a jellyfish on the beach.

I remember falling down the stairs to the basement once. That is to say, I fell down the stairs, and what I actually remember were the stairs quickly rotating around me as I got closer to the bottom. Amazingly, perhaps via some extra-sensory motherly intuition, my mom caught me before I hit the bottom. I’ve always found this memory to be perplexing as well, mainly due to the peculiarity of how I remember it.