My father took a medical residency in Augusta, Georgia. One day when I was not yet three, a traveling photographer came around and hoisted a bunch of us kids one by one up on a pony. It was such a shock to me, to be sitting on a saddle on top of a big animal, that my consciousness "woke up" for about half an hour that became my earliest permanent memory. Then while I was still two my father moved us back to Washington state where his new job was as a general practitioner at Madigan Army Hospital in Forth Lewis, Washington. He would sometimes go away to chess tournaments and leave my birth-mother as a "chess widow" for a weekend.