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of having a bad memory (such an afflicted person is less worldly, less ambitious, less garrulous), and asserts that "an outstanding memory is often associated with weak judgment." There are other treats in store for the deeply forgetful person: "Books and places which I look at again always welcome me with a fresh new smile."
    Montaigne suggests that he is utterly helpless. And while it is true that remembering depends on habit, it also depends on the use of deliberate techniques. I agree in general with Dr. Johnson's observation, reported by Boswell, that "forgetfulness [is] a man's own fault."
    Yet often the very drama of events prints them on our memory.
    At the age of two I started a fire under my crib. I put a match to some newspapers, as I had seen one of my older brothers doing just a few days before. Without any alarm I was a spectator to a great tumult in the house as my burning mattress was flung out the back window onto the lawn.
    Not long after that I squeezed through the loose picket of a fence and cut my scalp on a rusty nail on the top bar. The resulting scar was a white crescent, and for a long time, whenever I got a short haircut, people said, "What's that on your head?" I must have been very young—how else could I have gotten through that small opening in the fence?
    A few days after my sister Ann Marie was born, in 1944, when I was three, I was being looked after by a neighbor while my mother stayed in the hospital. Lonesome for my father, I noticed he wasn't home. Believing he was at church—it was a Sunday—I eluded the baby sitter and walked there, a quarter of a mile away. I distinctly remember the long crossing of a four-lane road known as the Fellsway—I was so small I could not see over the hump in the middle to the other side. I sat on the church steps calling out "Daddy!" and there I was found by my panicky father. A search party had already been sent to a nearby brook, believing I had fallen in and drowned. I suppose this was my first attempt at independent travel.
    The first book that was read to me was
Make Way for Ducklings
(it had a Boston setting), and the second was
The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins,
by Dr. Seuss. As soon as I could read I wanted to be a hero.
    I can name nearly every child who was in my first-grade class, Miss Purcell's, at the Washington School, in Medford. We wrote with big thick pencils. In the third grade Miss Cook introduced us to ink—we had inkwells and used sharp steel nibs; the difficulty of forming letters with those sputtering nibs is vivid to me today. I know Psalm 23 because it was Miss Cook's favorite when I was eight. I knew the distinct odor of everyone's house, friends and relatives', where I was taken as a child: the assertive and often offensive reek of cooking and different people. Blindfolded, I could have identified thirty of those smell-labeled households.
    I have more recollections of this kind, which go under the name "episodic memories" and I am well aware of their approximate truth. "Remembering is not a re-excitation of innumerable, fixed, lifeless, and fragmentary traces," Sir Frederick Bartlett wrote in
Remembering.
"It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reaction or experience, to a little outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in language form. It is thus hardly ever exact, even in the most rudimentary cases of rote-capitulation, and it is not at all important that it should be."
    I have altered my memories in the way we all do—simplified them, improved them, made them more orderly. Memory works something like this: stare at a square and then close your eyes; the afterimage will gradually soften into a circle—much more symmetrical and memorable. Goethe was the first to write about this phenomenon.
    "Few have reason to complain of nature as unkindly sparing of the gifts of memory," Dr. Johnson