snippets of childhood

Most of my memories of childhood are locked in a huge tower, white on the outside but dark on the inside, and every so often the Guardians of the Tower condescend to allow one out. More often, though, those memories of mine have to sneak their way out. Rather like prisoners starting a riot; in the ensuing ruckus, a few of them have a chance to break free, unnoticed. Those times are always a time of joy for me, even though on the outside it looks like pain.

Most of the things I tell people about my childhood feel more like stories I've told over and over, rather than "real" memories. Maybe that's just the way my memory works, I don't know. Sometimes this lack of memories worries me, it makes me wonder if there was some early childhood abuse that has made me lose all those memories. There was, after all, much abuse later (in school and otherwise) that has wiped much of my teen years out. But I suspect that the pre-school years were just particularly uneventful, that's why I don't recall them much.

When I look at old family photos, they give me things that I can call "memories", but to be honest they seem about as real to me as any poem or novel I might read. Or maybe it's the other way around -- I've read so much in my life, that stories seem as real to me as my own life. Maybe that's the curse of being an artist, eh?

The first memory I truly remember having was looking at an arch of blue flames, a pathway that looked very like the throneroom in the Wizard of Oz. What I was doing was looking inside of our gas heater, through the side door. I was very young, two perhaps, and somehow I knew that day was a turning point. Not because I was looking at a flame, but because I was conscious of my own existance.

But I can't just go right from being two to being nine, can I? So if I'm gonna tell of what's been told to me, I might as well go back to the beginning. My dad first spied my mom when she came to the A&P to apply for a bookkeeping job. The way he tells it, he was following her around that store like a puppy dog -- he was in love. They were married only a few short months later, in February of 1963. And I was their Christmas present, born in mid-December. In 1965 they got an Easter present, a son, and another son 14 months later. That last child taxed my mom's system so much that the doctor urged her not to have anymore. Soon she was glad she listened to him; three of us were more than enough.

From the baby pictures I've seen, I seem to have been a very happy child. Trips to the Audubon Zoo, frolicking in the wading pool in summers, playing on the swing set, homemade birthday cakes and pictures of me looking like Shirley Temple. Burying myself in my toybox, and being caught in the act. Genuine smiles in most of those photos. One notable one that I did not: a photo of me, in front of the tv set, crying. Seems I'd been trying to watch Miss America and one of my brothers blocked my view.

I also remember my baby book, which my mom kept up pretty well until I started school. The one I remember best is the page where one wrote baby's first words, first phrases, etc. Well, my mom wrote on it, somewhere after nursery rhymes, "Can repeat every commercial on television." (And still can, usually at the most inappropriate times. Particularly in grocery stores, with the particular product in sight.) My handwriting was also quite evident in that book, especially after year five. After year seven, mine was the only writing in it anymore.

Words have always been very important to me. I can't remember how old I was when I learned to read, but I do know I started before I went to school. I remember being five or so, angry over something, and I was going to run away. I wanted to write a note (somehow I knew you needed to write a note), and ended up asking my mom how to spell this word and that. Very funny in retrospect.

Didn't go to preschool or kindergarten, didn't have them in public schools in South Louisiana yet. I do remember looking forward to first grade, and when I got there I loved it. I got to be the narrator in the class play that spring, "The Three Little Pigs". We went from classroom to classroom doing the play, and I narrated every performance except the very last. Second grade was also very fun for me, full of learning and friends. That was the last academic year I have such fond memories of. Sometime in the next year I was branded "smart", and you know what kids do when they hear that.

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