The Earliest Known Evidence That I Might In Fact Actually Exist

Perhaps all of the news coverage of the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, with all of it's "where were you when you first heard?" reporting, has made me nostalgic, but I got to wondering what was the earliest evidence of my own existence.  The short answer is my birth certificate, which I won't be posting on-line for all the identity thieves out there, but I did manage to run across these baby pictures.

The barely post-adolescent young woman in the picture below is my mom, circa 1954, in what I imagine is one of her first days back from the hospital after having delivered her first child.  I have absolutely no recognition of the furnishings in the room around us, but given her casual attire, I imagine it must have been my first home.

Here's Mom a little bit more dolled up, along with the youngest picture of my late Dad I've ever seen, and in my father's face I can clearly see the features that I've inherited.  The whereabouts of this picture is a mystery to me, but the checkerboard sofa we're sitting on is different from the sofa above, which I assume was in our own home.  So given that we're all dressed up, Mom wearing a string of pearls and Dad in his argyle socks, I would guess that this was shot at my grandparent's house, my Mom's parents.  But who knows?, I could be wrong.  Given the bewildered expression on my face, I clearly had no idea even then of where I was.

I personally don't accept the idea of reincarnation in the sense of transmigrating souls, that a person was once somebody else during a former life and will be yet another person in some future life.  In fact, I have strong doubts about the existence of "a person" as an entity separate from the rest of the universe.  Looking at these nearly 60-year-old pictures, I don't see that little infant as "me." I have no sense of self-recognition; in fact, I feel a stronger affinity and sense of identification with my Dad in the picture above.  

I propose that we all reincarnate several times during the course of this one existence. In this present lifetime, we have the chance to be several different people, should we be so lucky as to survive long enough.  That little infant in the pictures above was one of my former selves, who later reincarnated into my childhood self, who reincarnated into my adolescent self, and so on down the chain of existence to the old man posting this blog now.  There's really no point in wondering who or what we'll be in the afterlife, or if there's even such a thing - what matters is what we become right here, right now, during this very life.    

But anyway, where was I when I heard that Kennedy had been shot?  As I recall, I was told by the bus driver taking me home from school in Levittown, Long Island.  As long as I'm being nostalgic and borderline self-indulgent, here's a photograph of where reincarnation had brought me to by 1963.  

I feel sorry for the person who had to break it to this little boy that his president had just died.

Post-Script:  My Mom, who naturally found this post to be very entertaining, informs me that the first picture was actually at my grandparents house, and if a gal can't wear a bathrobe at her own mother's house after giving birth, then what's the point?  She doesn't know where the second picture was taken, but recalls we were all dressed up because it was Easter Sunday, which would have made me about 9 months old in that pic (Easter Sunday fell on April 10th in 1955).  In any event, none of the pictures were at my home, which is a relief knowing that I never had to live with that hideous sofa in the first picture.