When I was three years old, my family gathered at a small beach in New Jersey. It was August; all I can remember is the heat and salt. My father had apparently gone off with his uncle to look for clams, working to harvest them with long poles, standing waist deep in the water off the shores. This left my mother with her father-in-law, Robert, and me.
Robert had served in the second world war, was involved in a friendly fire incident, and had a breakdown. He was diagnosed with what was then called manic depressive psychosis and hospitalised repeatedly. Doctors considered lobotomising him. In the 1970s, he had a catastrophic stroke. By the time I met him, I remembered him as a thin man in a wheelchair, only able to utter a tragically absurd pair of words: “Blue fish”.
That day I was feeling, according to my mother, “intrepid”. There was a playground at the beach and I wanted to learn the monkey bars. In between teaching me how to swing, she would ask me to wait and turn to attend to Robert, who was sitting at the edge of the playground. I did not wait. I ran off, hoisted myself up, and attempted to rock myself from handhold to handhold. I failed and fell. My mother, rushing to me, was too late. It was a compound fracture, the bone in my arm was sticking out the back of my elbow. But picking me up, bringing me to her chest, she encountered reassurance from her child.