When I see these patterns and styles and materials, it must have some elemental connection to early happy childhood. I mean, I must have been very happy, because even now that curtain doesn't inspire the amount of dread it should.

I lived with those end tables all my childhood, and it never occured to me that they looked like wooden robot-dogs that might just walk across the room some day.

This was the old place on 8th street, where my earliest memories reside. Then we moved to the 'burbs . . .