Baby In A Cage

My earliest memory was a search for toys. I remember crawling out of a beige framed door into a large white hallway and trying to find the room with the toys. It wasn't until I about ten that I received the information to put this memory into the context of my life. You see, when I was two years old I broke my left femur (that's your thigh bone). If it sounds like that might be a hard thing to do, it is. I started a long string of strange and pathetic injuries at an early age, but I digress. The reason I was in this hallway, apparently, was that I had unraveled the soft cast the doctors had placed on my relatively unformed leg and then proceeded to unhook myself from the traction that I had been slung in. After performing this amazing feat of baby acrobatics I proceeded to climb out of my crib, dragging my broken leg behind me, and crawl into the hallway with a limp. And that is where my first memory of life came in.
How did I get into this strange situation? My big brother did it to me. That's not really fair of course, but you don't have to be fair when you're two years old (the birthday of which I celebrated by blowing out the candles through the bars of my crib while hanging from the ceiling). We had been playing on the living room chair where he was yanking me off of the arm of the chair into the waiting pile of pillows below. This was working amazingly well for an idea that had been developed by a five year old and a slightly less than two year old, right up until my left foot got caught and the plummeting momentum of my underdeveloped little body managed to snap my thighbone into two separate pieces. The only upside of this entire situation was that for the rest of my life my big brother never really beat me up - we would play fight, but whenever I called stop we would stop. A far cry indeed from the regular beatings that other younger brothers I've known apparently grew up with.
The downsides of this situation, unfortunately, were many. It was like having your tonsils taken out and never having a sore throat again, but then being unable to ever eat ice cream or fudgesicles afterwards. In my case I was unable to sleep away from home for the next eight years. The unfortunate result of being two and seeing your mom and dad only a couple of hours each day during visiting hours for six weeks. And now even though I live away from home, I am desperate for personal company - the idea of living alone scares the hell out of me. Of course, the far more devastating effects of my time on the hook are yet to be discovered. You see, after the excursion in my memory - which was, apparently, only one of many - I was caged. Yes, that's right. They put a two-year-old baby boy in a cage (okay so it was one crib on top of the other, but still - it was a cage). The only reason, I think, that I'm not claustrophobic is that I was a very small child and I never realized the lack of space - of course maybe I'm just a closet claustrophobic (HAH! Sorry, sometimes I just have to laugh at my own jokes - otherwise nobody would and they'd be lonely). But even though I may not be claustrophobic I do suffer from a myriad of psychological disorders, not the least of which is a plethora of neuroses far too immense to put into the few pages that I have to talk about me. I try not to think about all the things that may be wrong with me, but if you know anything about neurotics you know that that really isn't possible.