community called North Highlands. The perspective was effaced, and in its place stood gray hangars and flat-top. Some mornings, I remember seeing Air Force uniforms line up in the distance for inspection outside the mouth of one of the hangars. I also remember seeing Phantom Jets taking off from the runway far in the distance.

With the expansion of the runway came the loud, late night noise of jet-engine testing that shook our house and stole my mother's sleep. Shortly after the jet-engine testing began, Paul and Della's chickens became sterile and died off. The property seemed to decay that much more quickly beneath the low approach of large, propeller driven communications planes as they came down to land, so close I could almost see the details of the landing gear.

Paul died, Della stooped even more, George suffered a nervous breakdown, Irene underwent a hysterectomy, and my mother seemed to age overnight. Once she began driving, she thoroughly stopped walking; and the insomnia made her eyes puffy, and what I remember of her youth evaporated in the five years we lived there. Such was the power of eminent domain.

I went through some difficult times myself, five years old and plagued by nightmares that penetrated my waking hours as well. I think the common term is "night terrors." Most of them involved being tormented by some faceless demon who delighted in applying electric shock to my lower spine. One time I remember my little bed being covered by creepy white caterpillars. My mother tried to wake me, and I remember screaming at seeing my mother's face covered with those caterpillars. My mother and Bob could only wait until those terrors subsided before I was calm again.

I don't know where in my young experience such dark visions came from. It seemed as if some of the images came from my Childcraft books, others from old movie stills my mother once showed me. How they came to be sinister and threatening, I'll never know. I only know that I was kept under a doctor's care until the episodes tapered off sometime around my first year at school.

School held an entirely new variety of terrors for me. I am told that I was difficult, and at times violent, and so anti-social and ill-equipped that I had to repeat an entire year over. I remember being placed for a year in a "special education" class with epileptics, imbeciles, and all manner of undersize outcasts.