Free Winter Journal by Paul Auster Page B

have parked your body over the years—the places, for better or worse, that you have called home.
    1. 75 South Harrison Street; East Orange, New Jersey. An apartment in a tallish brick building. Age 0 to 1½. No memories, but according to the stories you heard later in your childhood, your father managed to secure a lease bygiving the landlady a television set—a bribe made necessary by the housing shortage that hit the country after the end of World War II. Since your father owned a small appliance store at the time, the apartment you lived in with your parents was equipped with a television as well, which made you one of the first Americans, one of the first people anywhere in the world, to grow up with a television set from birth.
    2. 1500 Village Road; Union, New Jersey. A garden apartment in a complex of low brick buildings called Stuyvesant Village. Geometrically aligned sidewalks with large swaths of neatly tended grass. Large is surely a relative term, however, given how small you were at the time. Age 1½ to 5. No memories, then some memories, then memories in abundance. The dark green walls and venetian blinds in the living room. Digging for worms with a trowel. An illustrated book about a circus dog named Peewee, a toy dalmatian who miraculously grows to normal size. Arranging your fleet of miniature cars and trucks. Baths in the kitchen sink. A mechanical horse named Whitey. A scalding cup of hot cocoa that spilled on you and left a permanent scar in the crook of your elbow.
    3. 253 Irving Avenue; South Orange, New Jersey. A two-story white clapboard house built in the 1920s, with a yellow front door, a gravel driveway, and a large backyard. Age 5 to 12. The site of nearly all your childhood memories. You began living there so long ago, the milk was delivered by a horse-drawn wagon for the first year or two after you moved in.
    4. 406 Harding Drive; South Orange, New Jersey. A larger house than the previous one, built in the Tudor style, awkwardly perched on a hilly corner with the tiniest of backyards and a gloomy interior. Age 13 to 17. The house in which you suffered through your adolescent torments, wrote your first poems and stories, and your parents’ marriage dissolved. Your father went on living there (alone) until the day he died.
    5. 25 Van Velsor Place; Newark, New Jersey. A two-bedroom apartment not far from Weequahic High School and the hospital where you were born, rented by your mother after she and your father separated and then divorced. Age 17 to 18. Bedrooms for your mother and little sister, but you slept on a fold-out couch in a minuscule den, not at all unhappy with the new arrangement, however, since you were glad your parents’ painfully unsuccessful marriage was over, relieved that you were no longer living in the suburbs. You owned a car then, a secondhand Chevy Corvair bought for six hundred dollars (the same defective automobile that launched Ralph Nader’s career—although you never had any serious trouble with yours), and every morning you would drive to your high school in not-too-distant Maplewood and go through the motions of being a high school student, but you were free now, unsupervised by adults, coming and going as you wished, getting ready to fly away.
    6. Suite 814A, Carman Hall; Columbia University dormitory. Two rooms per suite, two occupants per room. Cinder-block walls, linoleum floors, two beds placed end to end under the window, two desks, a built-in cupboard for storingclothes, and a common bathroom shared with the occupants of 814B. Age 18 to 19. Carman Hall was the first new dorm built on the Columbia campus in more than half a century. An austere environment, ugly and charmless, but nevertheless far better than the dungeonlike rooms to be found in the older dorms (Furnald, Hartley), where you sometimes visited your friends and were appalled by the stench of dirty socks, the cramped double-decker beds, the unending darkness. You were in Carman Hall during the