MY FIRST MEMORY

When I was a toddler in Kingston, an older boy led me into a shed in a backyard on Cooper Street. He unfolded some newspapers and spread them across the floor. Then he lit matches and tossed them on the papers. Then we exited deliberatively and walked over to Albert Street. A fire engine soon blared its arrival. The shed was engulfed in flames!

A few days later my family moved to a new house built on Churchill Crescent. A month afterward at a birthday party, the older boy told me a marshal from the fire department came calling. and seemed suspicious of him.

Many years later I heard that this boy had become a long-time resident of the local mental hospital.

At the beginning of the First Ice Age, ancient man, called Homo Erectus, started to move out of Africa. Was that strange timing? How could African apes survive perpetual winter?

Fire.