Tony Bennet left his heart in San Francisco and won a Grammy for his trouble, Bob Dylan was Blowin’ in the Wind and Big Girls Don’t Cry played on car radios as the nation mourned Marilyn Monroe. Western Samoa, Rwanda, Burundi, Algeria, Jamaica, Uganda and Trinidad and Tobago all gained their independence and the US Army ensured James H. Meredith was allowed to exercise his civil rights as the first African American man to enrol at the University of Mississippi.

A loaf of bread cost twenty-one cents, a gallon of gas was twenty-six cents and the average annual American income was $5,556.00. The first ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church in 92 years was convened and the Cuban Missile Crisis was in full swing. John F Kennedy was in the White House, Harold Macmillan resided at Number 10 Downing Street and Indira Ghandi was India’s first woman prime minister. John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature while the Beatles and fallout shelters were both becoming all the rage.

Along with Marilyn, the world also lost Ernie Kovacs, Lucky Luciano, Vita Sackville-West, William Faulkner, Hermann Hesse, e. e. cummings and Eleanor Roosevelt. The global population was approximately 3.136 billion and helping to swell the ranks were Jim Carrey, Axl Rose, Garth Brooks, Sheryl Crow, Vanessa Feltz, Jon Bon Jovi, Darryl Strawberry, Matthew Broderick, Emilio Estevez, Roger Clemens, Patrick Ewing, Jack Dee, Melissa Sue Anderson, Demi Moore and Jodie Foster.

Oh. And me. The year was 1962 and I made my debut as Debra Ann Smith at five minutes past six on the blizzardy Fort Wayne Sunday afternoon of November the fourth. I spent all of eighteen months in the fair state of Indiana and was the only Hoosier in a family of five Buckeyes. My only crystal-clear memory of this time is one of being bathed in a bathroom sink and getting my arm burned on the hot water faucet - it’s true. When confronted with the memory many years later, my mother said, "Damn, how on earth could you remember that? You were only a few weeks old!". I’m told my big sister dropped me on my head during this time, but if I retained any subconscious knowledge of the incident it only showed in my little-sisterly persecution of big sis from the moment I learned to crawl. Speaking of crawling, I do have another memory of my infancy, but it is more a composite of the rage I felt when forced into a dress. I can think of no torture more terrible for a crawling infant than to be made to wear a garment your knees catch on, stopping your progress across the room to pull sister’s hair or steal her toy. To this day I dislike wearing a dress.

From sometime in mid-1964 onward, I did my childhood thing in various leafy suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. It was a time of dysfunctional family living and Girl Scout Promises, child-psychologists and camp-fire sing-a-longs. It was the beginning of a journey, one that would eventually lead me to live an ocean away from my roots.