MY FIRST WORDS

1-years-old. "Coming of age. Combing of age." These were my first words.

I remember waiting a long time and being careful to practice nonsense sounds in private before performing this feat. Even if they were not my first intelligible sounds, they were my first attempt to make an intelligible expression. That’s what I understood ‘first words’ meant.

The thought contained in the expression represents my growing interest in being wise long before I died, as well as my attempt to find a meaning for mathematics, something I struggled to do long after this point, well after my teens.

I must have been at least 1 year and three months old, and perhaps as old as two years and one day, as this thought occurred at a time somewhat before my brother was born (in other words between the age of the beginning of my mother’s pregnancy with Brian and when he was born, when I was two years and two days old).

The above is recorded in the not-yet-published Theories of My Youth, which is now about 42 pages long.