When I was three-years old I climbed out of my bedroom window and rushed into the night. I wanted to capture the moonlight. The liquid rays enraptured me. I reached for them and tried to hold the moonlight in my hands.

Brightened by the moon, the brown, brick building where I lived cast a shimmering, silver shadow. Fog enveloped Hamburg, Germany, filling the air with a cold dampness and illuminating the steepled city with a bluish-green pallor. Foghorns blasted from the ships in the harbor.

I fled from a room painted blue, and blue moonglow lighted everything in it. I lusted for the moonlight and I didn't want to be punished for loving it, or for being free, and understanding what I thought nobody else in this world ever, before now, understood--all things radiate color. The universe is bursting with color and movement.

I ran and ran. My inner self blazed magenta. Every person, I thought, must shine with a color: Ciocia radiated purple; My mother, Angela, red.

I continued these nocturnal wanderings until age six when the police apprehended me, as a lost little boy roaming the streets. Ciocia met me at the police station, kissed me on the forehead, took me home and gave me a hot bath.

No one knew the person becoming inside me. Nobody knew or understood why I wandered the moonlit streets in a lonely celebration of myself. Who would listen to the tale of a young boy chasing the moonlight, while discovering his first taste of life and freedom?