From left to right, me, Kathy, and Carol Balcome.

I was seven when we moved into the upper half of a duplex on Raymond Ave, an apartment only a fraction of the size of our Dudley home and, speaking of losses, the first thing I remember is my cat, Timmy, running away. More than once we went back to the old neighborhood to search for him—without success.

In the living room we had modern blond-wood furniture, a sofa with stylized fish on it, matchstick blinds on the front window, and, to either side, a small, framed print of San Francisco that Mom had brought from California. The room looked out onto a residential street lined with elm, oak, and maple trees, and, unlike in Berkeley, the view wasn’t obstructed by telephone poles and wires—or fences around or between the houses either. And, as I said when I wrote my blog “The Expurgated Version,” there were cases of butterflies, moths, and beetles all around the room.

After first grade at University Elementary School, I decided that I wanted to go to the local school with the kids who were my neighbors instead. My parents acquiesced, and in the fall Doug and I started at brand-new St. Anthony Park Elementary School. (“Gutterdump” had been torn down.) When I look back on this decision of mine, I realize I was needing a sense of community that was lacking in my life.

I soon became best friends with my neighbor across the street, Wolfy, and down the block, Kathy. Before long I was taking modern dance lessons in the basement of the local library with girls from my class—Mary, Margie, and Susie—and had joined Bluebirds, where I remember making a tom-tom out of a coffee can and a scrap of rubber tire, as well as a paper mache cat that I decided was ugly. At Christmastime we sold peanut candy door to door. Summers, Kathy and I went to Bluebird camp on Lake Cheewin together, where we swam, rode horses, and learned songs like “This Land is Your Land” and “The Happy Wanderer” that we sang as duets year around. Or we sang rounds like “White Choral Bells”:

White choral bells upon a slender stalk

Lilies of the valley deck my garden walk

Oh, don’t you wish that you could hear them ring?

That will happen only when the fairies sing.

On the fourth of July all the kids in St. Anthony Park gathered for a costume parade at Miller’s Drugstore and marched down Como Avenue to Langford Park, where our school stood. There was a bandstand with music, games and races, a treasure hunt, and, in the evening, fireworks.

When I was four, we moved to New Haven for a year so my dad could get his Ph.D. in philosophy at Yale. Doug and I went to an all-day preschool run by three black women. I loved Miss Green, while Doug’s favorite was Miss Brown.

For the first months back in Minnesota, when I was five, we were unsettled. I went to two different kindergartens before we rented an old two-story house on Dudley Street in St. Paul, and I started attending Gutterson Elementary School—“Gutterdump,” as the kids called it—a staid, old-fashioned red brick building with an asphalt playground. It was there I was sent to the principal’s office, not to be disciplined but to show her the drawing I’d done of my class having a parade. Her office was on the second floor, however, and when I reached the top of the stairs and looked around, I couldn’t tell where I was supposed to go. So I went back downstairs and only pretended to my teacher that I’d done what she asked. (I no longer know what my parade drawing looked like, because the first example of my artwork in my childhood scrapbook is a turkey, also drawn when I was five. Just for the fun of it, I’ve updated that turkey and plan to post both versions in my upcoming Thanksgiving blog.)

Another memory I have, besides being scolded once for whispering during nap time, is of asking a first grader on the playground if it was hard to learn to read—because I was already anxious about my ability to master this skill.

The Dudley house had a row of pink peonies on one side of the front lawn. (I still remember the sticky sap on the buds and how they swarmed with ants.) There was an ample backyard, where we had a swing set—and where my dad built a snow igloo that winter for Doug and me to play in. Behind the garage, a previous tenant had planted corn, melons, and asparagus that we ate—well, except for the melons, which usually were stolen before they were completely ripe. My dad got my brother a black lab we called Blackie and a black cat for me, Timmy.

On Halloween I went in costume to our next-door neighbor’s house by myself, and when Mr. Landis opened the door, I said “Trick or Treat,” as instructed. Instead of giving me a treat, however, he said, “What’s your trick?” Confused and bewildered, I turned and ran home.

For Christmas we got a tree so big that Dad had to cut off the top. One evening we went to downtown Minneapolis to see the windows of Dayton’s Department Store, where they had festive scenes like Santa’s workshop with mechanical elves.

Sometimes Dad would have to stop by his office on our way home from somewhere. We would drive through “Dinky Town,” where the college kids hung out, a name I’ve always remembered because it seemed so cute to me. Then my dad would park behind the Philosophy Dept. building and Doug and I would wait in the car for what always seemed like an eternity. My father never actually took us inside, so I have no idea what his work environs looked like.

Before Easter that year, when just my dad and I were in the car, he stopped at a store and came out with a pink box. He said he’d bought a cake and put it in the backseat. But I could have sworn I heard sounds coming from the box. It wasn’t until we got home that I discovered he’d bought me a little duckling.

He made a tiny cage for it—a foot square, out of wood and chicken wire—that we kept out by the garage. When I let my duckling out of its cage, it would chase me all around the yard, which delighted me.

But then our neighbor, Jack Landis, told my father that it was inhumane to keep a duck in such a small enclosure. My father claimed at the time that he called some expert at the Farm Campus of the university who assured him that it wasn’t inhumane. Though my father was fascinated by animals, he was convinced that they didn’t have feelings, a hard thing for me to understand since they so obviously do. In a similar way, he would renege on his promise to pay for my braces years later, claiming my dentist had assured him that having protruding teeth wouldn’t damage my self-esteem, and, even more years later, when I insisted that sexual abuse was always hurtful to children, he would claim that the “foremost expert on child development” had reassured him that it wasn’t.

I gave my duck to the Como Park Zoo to live out what I hoped was a happy life, and to this day, I’ve never eaten duck.

Margret also sent me, carefully packed in styrofoam peanuts and sealed in plastic bags, the christening gown my grandmother Marie made my father before his birth and the Bible my grandfather Frank gave her when she converted to Catholicism.

Frank was a chemical engineer who designed city water systems and was already in his mid-thirties when he married Marie, one of his technicians. Not long ago, my mother told me that it was my grandfather who insisted she have their baby in the hospital—at a time when most women, with the help of midwives, were still delivering at home. Apparently he believed she’d get better care there. But twelve days after giving birth to a healthy red-haired baby boy, my grandmother died in the hospital of “childbirth fever,” caused by unsterile conditions. Family lore has it that if the baby had been delivered at home by a midwife, Marie probably would have survived. This conjecture was buttressed in my own mind by a TV documentary I saw about Martha Ballard, a midwife who delivered a thousand mothers a hundred years earlier—and never lost a one. My grandmother Marie was only twenty-three.

Like Scrooge’s father in “A Christmas Carole,” my grandfather blamed his infant son for his young wife’s death—and treated him forever after that with resentful hostility. It’s even likely that he hit my father as an infant in the cradle, because that’s what he did years later to Margret. After Marie’s death, my grandfather’s sister, Julia, came to live with them and take care of my father, so for years he thought she was his mother. But when my dad was seven, Frank remarried—Estelle, a sadistic, perhaps even psychotic woman, by all accounts. Julia was sent away, and Estelle gave birth to a son. My father described to me once how Estelle used to strip his half-brother Ray when he was a boy, put him in the bathtub, and beat him mercilessly with an iron cord. And though my father insists Estelle never beat him, Ray told me she deliberately put rotten meat in my father’s sandwiches. In the Catholic school they attended, the nuns were physically abusive, as well. My father said one nun smacked a classmate of his on the side of the head and permanently deafened him in one ear. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that my father eventually repudiated the religion of his tormentors. While still a teenager, he decided there was no God. The only thing that was painful about reaching this conclusion, he told me, was the thought that he would never meet his mother in heaven.

What struck me after reading “ The Black Lyre” was how like Ariphanes my father was—an unwanted child, an orphan in a sense, whose extraordinary gifts were scorned by the “pious” adults around him—an embittered father who couldn’t love him, a brutal stepmother who seemed intent on poisoning him, tyrannical nuns who ruled their classrooms by intimidation and physical abuse…. When he grew up, the revenge he took was Ariphanes’. He spent his entire professional life proselytizing against religion; in philosophical papers and university classes, he tried with his instrument—not a lyre but his exceptional powers of logic—to create doubt and undermine faith wherever he found it.

I have eight photos of my beautiful Swedish grandmother Marie, my father’s mother. In a blurry one, she’s sitting cross-legged in a field, bundled in a light jacket, her long skirt wrapped around her feet. Her hands are resting in her lap, a jaunty straw hat with a large bowl shading her eyes. Her head is cocked charmingly, the slanting sun lighting up the hat, casting the shadow of her nose across her cheek and catching the full breadth of her engaging smile.

My half-aunt Margret, who’s my age and like a cousin to me, recently sent me a ninth—a photograph of my grandparents she’d found in a chest in her attic. They’re sitting in the grass in a park. Without her hat, you can see my grandmother’s hair is fair, and I’ve always wondered if she was a strawberry blond like me. Her collar has a tassel, her dress a cummerbund, and her shoulders look thin and angular, like mine. The brown oval mat that frames the two of them is crumbling with age. I’m torn: out of reverence, I want to keep the photo just as it is; out of aesthetic compunction, I want to strip away the moldering mat. With a razor I slit open the paper backing, only to find the photo fixed in place with a battery of tiny rusted nails. Using pliers and a screwdriver, I carefully bend and jiggle them free.

When I finally pry the oval mat from the photo, I see, in a corner that was hidden, three women in broad-brimmed hats strolling on a path beyond the shrubbery—in another second they would have passed beyond view. And suddenly, I’m jolted—shocked—into an apprehension of the moment: that one instant of that one day, when my grandparents were in love and thought they had all the time in the world.

Well, the conversion of our apartment building into a mini-dorm continues. Though I put in earplugs last night to shut out—or at least mute—any noise this morning, I awoke to my body vibrating with every hammer stroke, along with the entire structure around me. Nevertheless, I’m determined to continue too:

Another major player in my life was my father, who was—arguably—my primary parent and who would exert a powerful influence over me long after my mother divorced him and moved my brother and me halfway across the country. He was brilliant, it must be said—perhaps the most intellectually vital person I’ve ever known.

Everyone called my father Red, but it was years before I connected this nickname with the color, it sounded so completely different to my ears. He used to wear a nylon stocking over his head to train his dark red hair back, like Einstein’s. Throughout my childhood he spent the better part of every day holed up in his study, reading, except for the hours he taught at the university. I’d knock on the door timidly, afraid to interrupt him at his work.

When I was a child, he was the one I took all my questions to because he—literally—knew all the answers. He gave my brother a chemistry set (Doug says he was six at the time) and bought us both a microscope with which we peered at the one-celled organisms he brought home in jars of swamp water. He took us butterfly hunting, sent away for eggs, and eventually hatched from cocoons a cecropia moth and the most spectacular luna moth I’ve ever seen, even in museums—huge, pale green, its body covered with white down and its extravagant tails tinged with pink. Cases of insects of all kinds stood propped on dressers and hung from the walls.

He took us lizard hunting on cross-country trips. In our bedroom was a terrarium filled with reptiles. He created tools for their capture—a slip noose on the end of a fishing pole for the collared lizards that sunned themselves on the rocks of Oklahoma, a two-pronged fork on the end of a broom handle for the lizards that camouflaged themselves under the sands of New Mexico.

In Carlsbad Caverns we caught a giant millipede that wound up in the terrarium too (even with all those legs, it couldn’t move very fast). Throughout the southwest, we took night rides to capture tarantulas by the glow of our headlights. Near the Desert Museum outside Tucson, we caught two sun spiders—the most hideous arachnids I’ve ever seen—and put them in a jar. Later we discovered they’d completely dismembered each other.

On one of these trips we found an egg, brought it home, and waited to see what would hatch out of it. What finally emerged was a hog-nosed viper, a tiny spotted snake with a flattened nose. For weeks my father sent my brother and me down to the Triangle—the vacant lot at the end of the block, overgrown with weeds and nettles—to catch insects to feed it, but, curiously, it never seemed to eat. From among the last slides my father sent me a few years before his death—he was cleaning out mementos—I held one up to the lamplight, only to see that tiny snake swallowing a lizard twice its size.

There was the time Dad captured a porcupine and kept it in a barrel in the basement till the stink became unbearable. The time he fired his gun into a crevice in a rock and dragged out a rattlesnake. The time he returned from Mexico with the back seat full of five-foot iguanas, which he donated to the local zoo.

He took my brother hunting and both of us fishing—at the Twin City lakes and in the northern wilderness, where we would rent a cabin without water or electricity. Each morning we would row out on Lake Owen or Radison at dawn to the call of loons—and catch sunfish, crappies, bass, and northern pike that my dad would scale and fry up for breakfast. On one trip we even went on a long trek through the dense woods (in Minnesota, you had to worry about poison ivy, not poison oak) eager to see a small, newly discovered lake.

These are the activities that I shared with my father and brother in the years before my parents’ divorce. And this is the expurgated version of my relationship with my dad—the one without any mention of how much he intimidated me, the one he would have allowed me to write without threatening a lawsuit.