First Thoughts

I don’t know or remember anything about the specific circumstances of my birth except its setting and the fact that I was baptized some seven or eight weeks later. I like to think that my parents were happy to welcome me into the world, that my father was proud and my mother doting, but there’s really no way of telling. Something in me, as I reflect back, thinks that their joy was incomplete, that maybe there was a pit in my dad’s stomach or a shadow or reluctance over my mother’s heart. But I can’t say and my only reason for supposing is that those senses have been in my heart and my stomach for so much of my own life.