This is Gino Pelli in, oh, 1963, it looks like. He liked my mother, and my mother recently told me, "Oh, Gino loved you, Marco." He took us to Disneyland and bought me a magic wand that glowed in the dark, and took special care that I understood it would not actually do anything but glow in the dark. "You can try it and see; you never know. But I wouldn't count on it."
    He was studying to be a doctor. One time my mother drove us up to his house and a little tree branch broke the Oldsmobile's radio antenna off-- I remember being astounded that a man-made metal thing could be so fragile. Gino talked to me for hours about molecules. He drew all over his table with a marking pen. I think my mom is still in touch with him.

    This is Grampa and Aunt Wanda and Grammy and Uncle Jack, in that order. Look at what they're eating. They ate nothing but cake icing and foods made by rolling cake icing in bread. Their pies were half cake icing.
    Jack and Wanda weren't really my relatives; my mom usually took me everywhere she had to work, but sometimes she had to go someplace she couldn't take me, or she wanted to go out with some man, or, you know, whatever, and she'd leave me with Uncle Jack and Aunt Wanda, whose son hadn't quite yet been killed in Vietnam. The son's room was kept as he left it to come home to, with sports pennants and hunting rifles and festoons of beercan pull-tab chains (which I broke one of every time I went there; I wasn't supposed to go into that room, but I always did, and I was always surprised to break the pull-tab chain and tried to fix it and made it worse, then fled and pretended it hadn't happened).
    Their front yard was entirely covered in plaster forest animals. Ducks, deer, a family of chipmunks, leprechaun blacksmiths, etc. Uncle Jack and Aunt Wanda lived right across the street from Ronnie Howard-- Opie in the /Andy Griffith Show/.  When my mom brought me to Jack and Wanda's, Uncle Jack would always greet me at the door with, "Hiya, Arco Marco-opolis! How'd ya like a knuckle samwich!" And I'd always look at him like, Huh?
    I saw my first really puzzling movie at their house. They were supposed to be watching me, and they'd leave me in the house and go away, and one day I was watching teevee there and a movie came on with Ray Milland in it, called The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. This movie was about a doctor, Ray Milland, who made eyedrops that let him see better than everyone else, and he didn't like what he saw and the eyedrops hurt, but he kept putting stronger and stronger eyedrops in --which anyone could have told him was a bad idea, you know, Why doesn't the cameraman stop him?-- and finally, after going to a cocktail party where he could see through people's shirtsleeves and pants-cuffs he went crazy and drove to an evangelical tent revival show where the priest, Don Rickles (!) yelled at him, "YOU SEE TOO MUCH!" The end, roll the credits. Again, Huh?
    And one time I got Jack's tools out and took the back of their teevee off, and I couldn't get it all back together before they got home from wherever they went, and Uncle Jack gave me a quick swat on my bottom and then sat across from me at the dinner table telling me over and over that I could have been killed. When my mom came to get me Jack looked at me while saying slowly to my mom, "He was a very good boy." He didn't say a word about the teevee.
    Wanda and Jack smoked like chimneys and they both died horribly and quite young of the same popular smoking-related illness. They couldn't stop smoking. They'd still be alive.

    My grandfather in 1984. He came to visit my mom, and so did I and Kay. Kay brought MCET's video stuff and made a little movie about my grandfather's hands doing things-- making pitzel cookies, cracking nuts, etc. Grampa had hands like catcher's mitts. He could crack walnuts with his thumbs. So in the picture in this nice house I'm the six-foot-two 140-pound college kid explaining to this ex-sports-team-manager, ex-bootlegger, ex-store-owner, ex-barbershop-quartet-bass, ex-retaurateur, father of four about how capitalism is destroying the world and no-one should be allowed to own anything. Grampa is not buying it.
    He had one eye that was all white, and everyone in the family told me a different story about how that happened. One time when I was little and I'd come in after Grammy yelled and yelled for me, I asked her, and she said that he was supposed to come in at a certain time and his mother yelled for him and he didn't come in and it got dark and he tripped and hit his eye on a stick, so I should always come in when she calls for me to come in.
    I have Grampa's policeman's cudgel that he wrenched away from a cop who'd hit him with it in the twenties. After he died --and it's odd that I can't remember what year he died; Juanita says 1987-- my mom parceled out to me over the years things she'd taken from his house before all the other relatives got there. A little at a time. "Here, this is your grandfather's sweater."  "Here, this is your grandfather's fingernail knife."  "This is your grandfather's nightstick."  "This was your grandfather's favorite towel."  "This pair of pliers belonged to your grandfather."  She's still giving me stuff that belonged to my grandfather that I know she just went out and bought somewhere or found at a thrift store, and I think that's fine. I always say thank you, and then I feel obligated to try to use the thing, which is easy because it's usually a useful thing. I haven't hit anyone with the stick yet, though; it'll have to be a really special occasion.

    Dang, you can't really see his eye here. You'll just have to take my word for it. You almost can see it in the picture farther above with the big teevee. It's his right eye. There are some other pictures where you can see it. I'll find them and put one in.

    This is Sheila rubbing herself on one of my gigantic model rockets that I used to shoot out of the middle of the Community School for their graduation ceremonies. I'll tell you an amazing story about Sheila later. I have video of this particular rocket blasting off from the middle of a circle of kids and adults, rising to just above the level of the buildings, then veering sharply left and rocketing away in the direction of the highway, hence the term. It crashed perfectly in the middle of the center divider.

    Aunt Jenny and Uncle Dave. They're Italian hobbits! And, of course, they're long dead now. Most of their adult lives they made their living managing this or that apartment building they lived in, which is a more interesting way to earn a living than you might think. You had to phone before you went over there, though, because if you didn't, Dave would be drunk and happy and loud and Aunt Jenny would bustle around serving everyone and snipping at him. Then she'd yell at him and apologize to everyone for him. If you phoned first, he'd silently watch teevee with his painfully swollen ankle propped up on a hassock. Jennie's ankles gave her trouble, too.
    Dave could play the saxophone like Charlie Parker. All his kids, Coogie and Joycie and Davy, became great musicians; you've probably heard of them. (Don't tell me you've never heard of Charlie Parker. Do a Google search.)  Uncle Dave was my grandfather's older brother.

    This is me and my little dog Pepper on the front lawn of my grandparents' house in Burbank. This looks like maybe 1965? Say 1965. I loved that dog but she was useless. If you didn't watch her the whole time, zoom, she'd be three blocks away, digging up someone's plants. See the big tag hanging from her collar? It said, "Please don't kill me."
    I used to play a game with Pepper when I'd be home alone at night sometimes while my mom was at work. We moved a lot, so we had this Swedish furniture that came apart into lots of sections and cushions. I'd take everything in the living room apart and make either a fort or a jail out of the parts, then, depending on whether it was a fort or a jail, I'd get inside it or outside it, put Pepper on the other side of the wall and go, "Come here, Pepper! Here, Pepper! Come on! Come here!" and Pepper would find a way to get in (or out). I'd fix that spot and try again, and again, and again. I learned a lot from this game about engineering and also about psychology. Pepper was a small, pet animal, mostly hair, with a brain the size of a pecan, and she could always get in or out, so how can anyone expect to keep a person in line without persuading him to do so on his own? And if you're not prepared to budget sufficient thought and energy for persuasion, what's the point in pretending to have power over others? And even if you put enough energy into acquiring power to actually get it, that just shows that power is all you want. Honestly, sometimes I think I'm the only person who sees that; otherwise how can so many profoundly ignorant, joyless, ugly people become so powerful? See, owning a pet can be very educational.
    I got Pepper from the dog pound when she was four months old and I was four years old; she died of extreme old age well over twenty years ago, and still, whenever I have a dream with her in it I wake up crying because she's dead. I care more about that stupid dead dog than about a lot of people. I had another dog, named Ferd, who I'll tell you about another time. Ferd was the smartest, bravest dog ever, and after surviving being struck by a car, and surviving being worked nearly to the point of drowning by one of my friends (that's part of what I'll tell you about), and surviving any number of troubles by sheer force of will, he ended up committing suicide --really, no kidding-- in an unusual way. A bizarre way.

And this is my mom. I think by now she's taken every class they give at the college near where she lives now, and she has degrees in like a dozen things. She raised me by herself, and as near as I can tell she did everything right so I'd grow up smart and happy. And she hardly ever says anything about how much she wishes I'd go back to school and get a brilliant job and how Juanita and I should start having babies before it's too late. And she mails me a pair of shoes about once a month, and pairs of pants as big as a tent in case I suddenly become fat. She has a collection of every issue of all the papers and magazines I ever produced, and she stays up late to listen to my radio show over the web. And she just bought me a subscription to the Christian Science Monitor, an interesting paper that doesn't accept advertising because advertising money would corrupt the editors. Cool, huh? Thanks, mom!