One of my early memories is being very sick so that my mother was sleeping in my bedroom with me. It’s very strange, but I think I remember Reed being there as well, so I think he must have been sick also, otherwise why would he have been there? Or perhaps I’m just imagining that part.

Anyway, I remember being scared, and I think I must have been running a fever, and the light in the stairway was on and it was shining into the bedroom. I’m not sure if I couldn’t sleep or if I had woken up in the middle of the night, but what I recall most vividly is looking down at my pillow, and there where my head had left a depression, a huge, ugly black spider with hundreds of legs was dancing in a pool of sand.

I guess I screamed or cried or whatever I did I woke up my mother, who calmed me down. Then she showed me that there was no spider on the pillow or anywhere, and I guess I must have finally put my head down and gone back to sleep. Or tried to.

I’m not sure when this happened, but I’m guessing that I was perhaps four or five years old, and I’m further guessing that this was probably the time that I had the chicken pox. One of the symptoms of chicken pox is fever, and I assume that that could lead to hallucinations.

Anyway, I do know that Reed and I had chicken pox around the same time; he had it first and probably gave it to me. That might be why he was there, or why I remember him being there.

I definitely remember that after he had recovered but I still was ill, I was wondering why he couldn’t catch the pox from me. That’s when both he and my mother told me that once you had the pox, you couldn’t catch it again.

It didn’t seem fair. I wanted to give back what he had given to me.