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words I did not yet possess in my vocabulary.
    My mother found the baby bag they gave her at the hospital and looked inside for the bottle—but there was none to be found. No bottle, no formula. But, wait a minute… isn’t there a breast in the room?! Helllooo!
    My mother must have heard me, and so she attempted, with her own mother’s instruction, to breast-feed me. But either the plumbing wasn’t working, or I was already hooked on the Carnation Sugared Milk-Like Fatty Liquid Yum-Yum Substance, because I was having none of it. The crying continued, and Bess instructed her daughter to wake up my dad (who was already asleep; first shift at the factory began at 6:00 a.m.) and send him into Flint to get some formula at the only all-night drugstore.
    As for me— I was convinced these people were trying to starve me to death! And I didn’t know why! The wailing continued. Dutifully, my dad put on his clothes and took the two-lane road into Flint to buy some formula and a bottle. He returned an hour later, and they quickly prepared it and gave it to me. I grabbed at it with what little strength was left in me. And I didn’t stop gulping until it was all gone.
       
    For some reason, I never found my way to the path called “normal,” and it was a good thing that science and business had not yet conspired to invent ways to sedate and desensitize a little soul like mine. It’s one of the few times I thank God for growing up in the ignorant and innocent fifties and sixties. It would still be a few years before the pharmaceutical community would figure out how to dope up a toddler like me and have the teachers and parents send me off to the “timeout room.” I have often imagined what the pediatricians of today would have done to me had they lived back then and witnessed my bizarre behavior.
    For instance, the way I would transport myself in my initial years. Crawling and then walking, like most babies did, wasn’t good enough for me. I had other plans. To begin with, I refused to crawl. I would not crawl for anyone. My parents would set me down on the floor and I would go on strike. Motionless. “I’m not going anywhere. You can stand there and look at me allllll you want ’til the cows come home, but I ain’t movin’!”
    After a while I could sense their disappointment, so around my ninth month I decided to crawl—backwards. Put me down and I would just go in reverse. Never forward, only backwards. And I mean as soon as I hit the floor I would shoot in the opposite direction. But I never ran into anything. It was weird, like I had eyes in the back of my diaper. My little body was somehow stuck in reverse, and if you wanted me to come to you, you had to point me in the opposite direction so I could back my rear end toward you.
    This became a source of amusement for the adults— too much amusement, I thought, as people were now stopping by just to see the backwards-crawling baby—so I decided to change it up. I began slowly, methodically, crawling forward. Not all slaphappy-forward like most babies. Just a very determined, thoughtful, one hand in front of the other—and not before feeling the texture of the floor first (a little here, now a little there) and then picking just the right spot that was acceptable to my aesthetic and my taste. And then I would crawl. If I felt like it.
    Walking seemed overrated, and as I watched the other toddlers in the neighborhood lifting themselves up and hanging on to furniture and pant legs in order to steady themselves before crashing down a few hundred times, I preferred to wait out this phase of my life.
    It became quite the standoff in the household. There was already another baby on the way, and even after Anne, my sister, was born and ready to crawl herself, I still hadn’t walked. Why? Why did I need to expend useless energy? I could already see what most of life involved: A third of it was lying in a bed, sleeping. Another third of it was either standing on your