I never had a first word, I had a first sentence. Dad thinks it came about from being around him and his large vocabulary. He talked to me not as if i was another adult, but somewhat as an equal; it really came out of him having too much pride and self respect to ever reduce himself to an action such as "baby talk". In addition to this, He'd never water down anything when speaking to me, so I spent my first few years wrapping my brain around words most college grads wouldn't be able to tell you the definition of. It may sound entirely preposterous to most, but its the truth. He was a constant presence in my life and that habit was the reason he was my favorite. But now saying this, maybe my association with him and the word papa makes more sense; a man who helped raise me called by a short alias inspired by fondness. He was slightly uncomfortable with this but he could never make an argument that made enough sense for me to stop or impede the swell in his chest whenever I said it.
His influence worried some [read: quite a few] people as they learned what common sentences for me were at three; golden moments would be found when Papa, Dad, and I were in public and I would randomly spew something like "Papa, can we get another severed torso from Aunt Molly?". In fact, Papa's favorite moment was this one occurrence when we took the tube and I stared at someone standing in front of where we were sitting for around 5 minutes before pulling on Papa's coat and asking for the circumstances in which you could kill someone with an earring and uncooked spaghetti. He told me in animatedly gruesome detail. Though we were scolded for speaking so loudly, Dad couldn't help but giggle at the woman's face as she reached up to touch the three earrings on her right ear only to realize my question spawned from her grocery bag nearly sitting on my lap.
Papa also set up most of my traditions; reading tales of pirates and far off places during days were the rain was merciless and there was nothing else to distract us, Friday night dissections in preparation for Saturday morning experimentation, random deductions in public to kill the boredom in between traveling and waiting for cases, pickpocketing. Papa taught me to play the violin, something dad thought would be one of the nicer things he'd pass down; until I bounced between playing it to think and playing it because it was the closest thing within my reach that I didn't tire of after a few minutes...or hours.
