This was fun, but not as compelling to me as the visual component of my new aesthetic education, which consisted of boxed sets of slides from the Louvre and the National Gallery. We had just the information on the bottom of the slide, and the date: Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio, circa 1603. My cultural imprinting and my mother’s study of oil painting were thus furthered at once. And though we also used them for a kind of memory drill (This bathing Venus? Rubens!), an education in style was being conveyed, some sense of the wildly various lenses through which the world might be seen. Like the way the optometrist had worked, fitting me for my new glasses, in their “smoked plastic” frames; which do you like better, A or B? Now which is clearer? Here was a universe of renderings, from smooth Madonnas, their skin glazed to an unmarred translucence, to the spiky dappled pinwheels of Van Gogh.

(My new glasses came shortly after my new bicycle, and my bicycle accident. My father had taken me to the playground of Whetmore Elementary to practice riding the new bike. I’d loved the feeling of speed, coming down the long dusty slope, but I didn’t quite understand how the brakes worked, and couldn’t really see the high chain-link fence and the galvanized metal post that was hurrying right toward my left eye. An hour after the collision I had a huge lump just at the top of my eye socket, which shrank into a shiner of increasingly artful hues, as black and blue green as my old bread molds had been. My third-grade teacher, whose name has disappeared in a fog like the one I used to see from the back of the room when she wrote on the chalkboard, pointed out that I seemed to be squinting a good deal anyway. Soon I was outfitted with a bookish-looking new pair of spectacles that brought the world into a startling focus. I’d assumed everyone saw the same soft-focus blur I did, the world by Monet. The bicycle was returned to the store, a similar strategy to the one my parents had chosen when my first dog died; I was so hopelessly grief-stricken it was ruled I should never have a dog again. It would take me thirty more years to acquire a bicycle and a puppy, and to discover that these constituted two of my chief pleasures.)