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loved to read, his father wasn't present, his mother was busy cooking and serving, and in any case reading was a sign of studiousness.
His uneasiness with strangers Asimov traced to the fact that during his childhood his family visited no one and no one visited them. The fact that he read newspapers and magazines so carefully that no one could tell they had been read started, he believed, when he had to return magazines to his father's rack looking unopened. As a boy he had to awaken at 6 a.m. to deliver newspapers before school. If he wasn't down on time, his father would yell at his window from the street below, and later lecture him about the "deadly spiritual dangers of being a fulyack [sluggard]." To his last years, Asimov awakened without an alarm clock at 6 a.m.
He described his infatuation with baseball when he was in junior high school: he became a Giants fan, which was odd because Brooklyn had the Dodgers. "By the time I found out there was a Brooklyn team, it was too late; I was imprinted." He was "imprinted" in other ways as well. He blamed his fear of flying on his mother's oversolicitude about his health. ''My parents . . . trembled over my well-being so extremely, especially after my babyhood experience with pneumonia, that I could not help but absorb the fact and gain an exaggerated caution for myself. (That may be why I won't fly, for instance, and why I do very little else that would involve my knowingly putting myself into peril.)"
His mother's insistence that he keep her informed of his whereabouts meant that when he was out he had to report in at frequent intervals by telephone. "I've kept that habit all my life," he wrote. "It is a bad habit. It ties me to the phone, and if forgetfulness or circumstances get in the way, everyone is sure something terrible has happened." He traces his avoidance of books on how to write and of college-level courses on writing to "the ever-present memory of that horrible course in creative writing in the sixth term of high school."
It may not be surprising that someone who can find so many habits of the man in the experience of the boy would imagine a science of predicting human behavior, called "psychohistory," in his Foundation stories. On the other hand Asimov could relate anecdotes that seemed to demonstrate just the opposite principle of behavior. He recalled his father struggling to balance the books of the candy store every evening, being a dollar over or a dollar under and staying until he had straightened it out. Later in his life, when money was easier, Asimov remembered handing his father five dollars to make up the difference, and his father commenting, "If you gave me a million dollars, that dollar would still have to be found. The books must balance." Asimov never could

 
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