Movies have always felt very real and personal to me…

This simple cup, saucer and plate matching set is quite ordinary…

April 1961, Far Rockaway High School baseball field, Queens, NY...

He hasn’t seen the light of day for years...

Do you know what you did every day in 1958?…

At nineteen, I, who did not read music...

The Reina Victoria Hotel in Madrid sits at one end of the Plaza del Angels…

She was my favorite Aunt...

The yellow house I grew up in had a cellar…

I was at Forbes Field, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates, on October 13, 1960...

When I was growing up in Glencoe, a bedroom suburb north of Chicago, I didn’t quite fit in….

Her hair, on weekends, was tidy…

As a child I rejected dolls, refused to read any books with human characters…

My father started his career in the 1930s, working in the oil fields in Maracaibo…

The inside cover of my red, leatherette autograph book reads…

When I was a child, the sky-blue teapot sat on the counter beside the stove…

If you want to begin to understand me, my family, my people…

It begins over 60 years ago…

On an unlikely street, Cinderella, in a less likely town…

My parents rarely bought hardbound books…