I got a bow and arrow for my birthday, my fourth birthday in 1953. My older brother Dan and I were both captured by the cowboy-indian craze that was so pervasive in those days. Makes me wonder how we got hooked on it since it was many years before we got a TV and I doubt we went to many movies of that sort. So where did we get the idea to sign up for the romance of the old west?

However it was, my parents got me a silly little bow and arrow with maybe 3 rubber tipped arrows, suction cups for points, and a little flimsy bow that might have been 16 inches tall.

But what I really remember is taking a first shot with a little arrow and aiming upward in our patio. We had a stucco house with a small back patio and then there was a retaining wall that I remember as 12 feet tall, so it might have been less than 6 feet tall.

Above the wall was a steep hillside covered with some sort of dense ground cover vine. I shot my arrow up over that wall into the green tangle of vines above it. And there it was, gone, lost.

I don’t know if we even looked for it, or just decided it was hopeless and gave up on it.

But the sense of loss stayed with me: getting the wonderful present, too good to be true, and instantly shooting and losing the arrow. Now, over 70 years later I wonder about this. What of the other arrows? Did I lose them all right away?

But the deep, empty feeling, having something nice and then losing it was overwhelming. And the memory stays with me forever: my first memory: losing something precious and feeling deeply diminished by the loss.

I didn’t blame anyone else. I knew it was my fault and that I had screwed up, but more deeply that I actually WAS a screw up… and would always be one.

Being the youngest in a family I received constant feedback indicating my insufficiency compare to two older brothers and two obviously competent parents. My sense of being a little fuck up never left. Even though on some level I was also my mother’s pet, being the baby of the family, yet knowing that I was in some way favored as the baby actually made me feel more deeply that I was a fuckup, that being the baby was a simple fact of my age and birth order, but would never be an excuse for dropping things, being clumsy and uncoordinated, saying dumb things, and endlessly demonstrating my inadequacy.

I think fighting that negative self identity – or giving in to it – is the essential story of my life. 

I don’t for a moment think that struggle with negative self image was caused by the loss of that toy arrow, but that is the moment that it  crystallized for me that I was fundamentally not worthy.

So I think I stumbled through much of the rest if my life trying to ignore the fact that I was rather useless, an embarrassment, and something the others accepted, when the did, only out of duty. 

I am sure that my mother was much more supportive than the others, but I was the third son, and I think her mothing might have become a bit jaded by this point. I always regarded her as a good mother, but I never doubted that she doubted my worth, that I was always going to drop the ball, spill the drink, and lose the arrow.