Reflections in my mind's I

From the time I was about three I have tended to freeze-dry special moments in the form of "snapshots" to keep for the future, "images" of sounds, shapes, and touch, of the the natural world and human designs, of close friends and passing strangers, of joy and torment, of malice to be healed or uprooted and kindness to be nurtured and sown. One of the first of those images--kept only in my memory--is a man without lower legs, awkwardly propelling himself on leather- covered stumps some late, dusky afternoon in an open-air market in wartime Hungary around 1942/43. There was icy slush on the street, and all these great big adults in their heavy coats and muffs and mufflers and boots were rushing by him. At first I was terrified. This was a gnome, a monster out of one my story books. But something made me look into the eyes beneath the fur cap and above the beard stubble, and there I saw . . . despair. Don't ask me how I knew. My fear was gone. All I wanted to do was run up to him to tell him I knew. But my Mama dragged me away. I wondered if he had at least seen my smile . . .

As the years passed I started to draw and paint some of those moments, or turn them into poems, and now I express them through computer art or capture them on video tape. The WWW is giving me a chance to share them with others because except for a few, they were never meant to be hoarded--they were meant to be shared.