I learned how to French kiss at around age eleven. Maybe I was younger. I didn’t keep notes then. The person I learned from wasn’t your typical “boy next door” type. Oh, he was next door all right, but definitely not a boy. He was an adult, a friend of my parents, a father, and a grandfather…

It was not music but drama that led me to win the Miss York County title. I interpreted part of a one-act entitled “French Gray”—essentially Marie Antoinette killing rats the night before she lost her head. Oddly appropriate. The first runner-up was six inches shorter than I and twirled a baton to patriotic music.

Let me confess, I hate baton twirlers. They’re perky and popular and doing something in which someone who has twirled a six-foot pike has trouble seeing the artistry. Years of Miss America pageants had produced a bevy of baton twirlers who never won but always placed. It only seemed logical to me that batons—flaming or not—were the kiss of death…

I don’t remember my son’s death or my husband’s. I do not remember the events preceding them. I do not remember my pregnancy. I do not remember my son’s birth. I do not remember what he looked like. I do remember his smell and red curly hair. I remember stories about him. I considered writing those stories, but they are not mine. What I do have is enough, because it is mine. A room number, a smell and a sound…

A year or so after the war ended I have a memory I know is mine. My mother, my three sisters and I were at Union Terminal in Cincinnati waiting for a train. Nearby stood a soldier in uniform. One of his arms had been amputated. Looking back, I believe he was on his way home from a veteran’s hospital. I watched in awe as he lit a match with his only hand, and then lit his cigarette. I remember thinking I had never seen a

man as handsome as this. At that tender age I was already attracted to beautiful men…

I’m not certain how my sister, brother and I were delivered to the I.O.O.F. Children’s Home in the early 1950s. Only my older siblings, Richie and Cathie, knew what was happening. Only four years old, I was oblivious that the situation was supposed to be traumatic. I thought of it as an adventure…

One of the many inconveniences of depression is that there’s no blood test, no scan to determine the nature of the chemical imbalance, so choosing the right family of medications is often a matter of trial and error. The first drug I tried was both—a trial and an error. That became real clear to me the day I found myself sitting on a park bench in Disneyland, the happiest place on earth, sobbing uncontrollably—a genuine meltdown on Main Street. I saw people passing by—parents pushing their toddlers in strollers, couples riding the horse-drawn trolley, kids hustling into the Mad Hatter’s hat shop—but I felt this terrifying sense that none of them could see or hear me. That if they happened to look in our direction, they would look at Charlie and wonder why he was talking to himself…

My brother’s descent started when he lost yet another job, becoming homeless one more time. He got onto a bus, rode downtown, and stayed there mingling with other kindred, homeless souls. He would call from time to time, or come to my door, and I would make sure he had a hot shower, clean clothes and a meal. Then he would disappear into the night again. I remember him mentioning that he would like to see the mountains of India again. That thought stayed with me as I sprinkled his ashes in the mountains of Flagstaff…