The label on the back of this family snapshot, in my mother's handwriting, reads "Donnie, 1943."
Let's start with the name of this blog, Cogito. It's from the Latin for I think. You remember the phrase: Cogito ergo sum, or, in English, I think, therefore I am. René Descartes (French, 1596-1650) said it first. If I were writing the phrase, I'd edit it to read I think, therefore I write. That's what I have done - and still do - with my life.
I've not written anything terribly important or memorable, but I've made a living at writing, for newspapers and broadcast stations in Richmond and most recently for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
But this is about getting started. I got started in the fall of 1942, nine months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, at Retreat for the Sick Hospital in Richmond's Fan District. My dad had joined the Seabees, and my mom was living with my aunt on Church Hill. (My mom reminded me occasionally that it was exceedingly uncomfortable being very pregnant during the hot summer months of 1942 in the days before widespread air conditioning.)
On my mom's side of the family, the Nichols side, I was to be the only boy in my generation - just as my Uncle Joe had been in his generation. (A single boy per generation would continue for at least six more decades.) Joe, who was my mom's younger brother, made a fateful decision in 1939: He joined the Army and wound up stationed on Corregidor, down at the bottom of the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines. And if you don't know already, a quick Google search will provide details of what happened to the U.S. Army there that will chill your soul.
So there I was on Church Hill, the pampered only boy with what was to become a slew of girl cousins on my mother's side, in a loving home with my mom, my Aunt Annie and my Uncle Bick, who was at home because he was 4F, meaning ineligible for the draft. My dad would soon be on his way to the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific to build landing strips on Bougainville for Marines. My Uncle Joe had already endured the Bataan Death March that summer and was on his way to Japan, where he would be a prisoner of war for the duration and come home weighing 85 pounds in 1945.
But I didn't know from war or much of anything else for that matter in 1942. There's an ancient sepia-toned snapshot of me, taken when I was a year old. I am in my Aunt Annie and Uncle Bick's back yard. I'm reaching for what looks like vegetables in a Victory Garden with a curious - at least that's the way I'd describe it - look on my chubby face. I must have been eating well back here on the Home Front in 1943.
My earliest actual memory is of when I was about 2-1/2 or 3. I have a vivid picture in my mind of me in a sailor suit, holding my mom's hand, and walking in our neighborhood. There is blood dribbled down the stark-white front of the sailor suit. My mom told me later that I had fallen and gotten a nose-bleed. I don't remember that. Fortunately, no snapshot was taken.
And so begins the Cogito blog, in which I hope to share with family and friends the story of who I am and how I got to be that person. I am 66 now, and I have the time to think and write about personal matters, and, I hope and suspect, the family and friends to show at least a polite interest if not fascination.
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