In the beginning, indeed. My memory goes way back, as I remember being born. When I was a child I had nightmares often, and no one understood why. I was from a family where everyone started talking very young, so my mother finally asked me to describe the nightmare. I did. I told her that I was dreaming I was in a nice warm bed and suddenly I was snatched out of it into a place with a lot of light and noise which frightened me. Then I was on something that was moving down a long hall with lights overhead and voices behind me, one high and thin, the other low. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but they finally pushed me into a large room, with more lights and loud crying, which usually woke me up.

“Simple,” said Jessie (my mother), “you just remember being born. You were born in a very bright room, surrounded by people, then put on a cart and wheeled down the long hall to the room full of other babies, some of whom were crying.” And that was the end of my nightmares.

We lived in Alma, Michigan, a place I do not remember, as we moved before I was old enough to get out and look around much. But I am told that I was taken care of by a wonderful Czechoslovakian woman named Mary Phykos (which is not necessarily the correct spelling...just the way I heard it). She ran out to the car that brought Jessie and me home from the hospital, took one look at me and said, “Oh, little poppa, little poppa,” as I looked very much like my father and his whole Lancashire bred family.

My older and younger sisters were members of the Whitney/Currie family, my mother’s side of the family, and I never really understood either of them. I don’t think either of them understood me either.

The real beginning of my childhood was after we moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where we three girls became little Scarlett O’Hara’s, ruled over by our ‘Mammy’ Mary and her husband, Jones, but that’s another story.

After the remembrance of being born, my other early memories are of visiting my maternal grandparents in Michigan, particularly Christmas at their house. When I was two (I know it was two definitely, as my sister was a baby in a bassinet, and she is two years younger than I) We rose early in the morning (my older sister, seven years my senior, took charge of me), and had to have breakfast first. Jessie had very strict rules about how to do the Christmas thing. After breakfast and cleaned faces and hands, we all lined up, the oldest person first (my grandfather, Papa, of course), and we went through the large French doors into my grandparent’s parlor, where a beautifully trimmed tree filled a corner of the room, next to the Victorian horsehair sofa, where my father sat, waiting to take the presents from under the tree and hand them out to the recipients, who filled the matching chairs, footstools and the floor, left for the youngest and last arrivals. No baby there, though, she had been nursed and put into her pink bassinet in my great aunt Annie’s room.

Daddy, a terrible tease, of course found presents for Mama and Papa, for Jessie and her Aunt Annie, while we children fidgeted and begged him to find something for us. We had been given our stockings and a large bowl to empty them into. Always an orange and tiny presents, but we wanted our REAL presents, so finally Daddy put aside the tie in its long gold package, and looked for something with MY name on it. Once it was my beloved doll with real hair whom I named Alice. Something made by Mama, who knit, crocheted, quilted, sewed and embroidered things for everyone. Or a huge bag of smooth blocks from Papa’s Lumber Company. My sister Betty Rae and I always received the most presents, and were soon surrounded by mounds of bright red and green paper, ribbons and bows and our loot.

The year I was two was outstanding not only for the happy Christmas, but also for the mean way Mama treated me, and the way Jessie rescued me from her. We always had hard candies in our stockings, so I took a large candy in my hot little fist and pulled myself up the long flight of stairs to Annie’s room to see my Baby Sister, the one I had waited for for so long. I woke her up and tried to give her the hard candy. Mama, who had missed me and heard me with The Baby, screamed when she saw me pushing the candy into The Baby’s mouth, “She’s trying to choke the baby. Get away from the baby, Peggy, shame on you, you bad girl, why are you trying to kill The Baby -- get away from her...” and she slapped me as she screamed.

By the time Jessie got to me I was shaking and crying. I told her I was giving my Baby Sister some of my candy. I thought I was doing a nice thing. Jess picked me up, calmed Mama, sending her downstairs with my sister, and carried me into the large bathroom across the hall (so remembered whenever I walk through the perfume department in a large store -- for Mama loved perfume). She sat on a chair near the sink and washed my teary eyes and flushed cheeks with cool water. “Mama doesn’t understand, darling, but I do,” she said, “don’t ever let Mama upset you, she never understands.”

When I was older I understood better what she had said. She was so right, Mama never did understand anything but her own selfish little life.