Last update: 01/07/00

We were asked to bring a personal item from our childhood to the workshop. So after the first day, I wrote these 2 short pieces.

I do not have any object. I think that I never valued objects. I only had my imagination, and shapes, and math. And I could not figure out how to bring my imagination here. So I tried to find something to bring.

I found a set of portraits of me in my childhood from 3 years to maybe 15. I almost never look at these. I have many pictures also of my family. I like them; I am close to them; they are smart and sincere, but I inhabit a different world. Seeing these reminded me of a dichotomy that I was always called: the same and different.

People always said that I have looked the same since I was very young. I think that everyone has the same face from their younger pictures. But I have had people recognize me (or my voice) after not having seen them for 10 years. And looking at these pictures made me remember this.

But they also always said that I had a different way of thinking even from my earliest days. As my awareness of myself and my surroundings has increased I have had more opportunities to validate: same and different. Maybe this helps people remember me.

Alejandro shares with me a great interest in lineage. When I was small, I became a pest by asking about my family history. My father was--and is--very no-nonsense and would entertain no questions about this. My mother was slightly more interested but her mother shared my father's view that unpleasant things from the past, like slavery, were best left undisclosed. Some unusual success in my early grades brought this question out again to the same responses. But the questions never went away.

Two years ago my father's sister wanted to try to look up her grandfather in the U.S. Census records. I flew to Atlanta, where she lives to assist her, although I assumed this search would be fruitless. I imagined that blacks were never counted. There is an immense amount of census data printed on microfiche in a very small font with a convoluted indexing system.

I started to employ my technical expertise and with some judicious use of finger checks (mistakes) we found--to my amazement also--a 1900 census entry for her mother's family in Virginia. This stated that her grandfather was born in 1860 in Virginia and that her mother had received a 9^th grade education. This was quite a lot at that time and gave some tie-in to my school success of many years previous.

12/12/99