After swimming, I would go inside his office and sit on the wooden chair in front of his big desk, where he let me play with anything I found in his top desk drawer. Sometimes, if I was left alone at his desk while he worked in the lab, an assistant or a student might come in and tell me perhaps I shouldn’t be playing with his office things. But my father always showed up and said easily, “Oh, no, it’s fine.” Sometimes he handed me coins and told me to get myself an ice cream ---
A poet once said, “We look at life once, in childhood;the rest is memory.” And I think it is not only what we “look at once, in childhood” that determines our memories, but who, in that childhood, looks at us.