A Memory--No, Some.

Too late now to tackle any of the subjects I'd planned on tackling (new title: sevenhundredfiftywordspastmidnight?) so I think I'll try a lamo writing school exercise that has occasionally yielded some useful line or idea or image in the past and write about a childhood memory. Okay. I just sat in front of the keyboard for ten minutes going over my entire childhood and adolescence in my head and yielded not very much. Well, that's not exactly true. For some reason, and I hope it's not early Alzheimer's, my memories are coming to me in snippets--I cannot recall a scene longer than a few seconds--which is usually not the case for me. So, because I must write something I will write the snippets. Not trying to be arty, I promise. As it comes:

Alison and I had a book called How to Make Mudpies or something similar that actually contained recipes for a variety of mud concoctions, with ingredients such as "crushed leaves" and "pebbles." One summer we both became possessive of the book and kept claiming ownership of it, and because we actually used it, took it quite seriously, in fact, it was ultimately a wreck: pages hard and crinkled from being soaked and dried, splotches of mud with bits of twig and sand encrusting it and so on. I can just make out the image of a little table set out in front of our play house with a tea party arranged on it and my dad walking across the lawn with some black still in his hair, having been invited to the gathering.

One of the quintessential scenes of my childhood--and there were so many variations on this that I may be combining more than one--is me and Alison, Andy, Jacy and Brandon, seated around the round glass table on my grandparents' porch eating supper, which is what we called it, while the grownups ate in the kitchen with the door closed between the two rooms. I never actually thought about that before, how the door was always closed, but it makes perfect sense to me now. We had bubbled glass glasses filled with my grandmother's childrens' "cocktail": an even mix of orange juice and gingerale. I have had orange juice and seltzer since but not that mix in 30 some odd years. I can almost, kind of, taste it.

The Goodnow Library, in Sudbury, was one of my favorite places as a child. We would go every week, at least, and our librarian was named Betsy. We were maybe her favorite visitors, or at least I felt that we were at the time. I loved her, felt that she understood and appreciated me, and I would have spent all day in the library if I could have. We were allowed to take out as many books as we wanted, and we often left with twenty each. I remember my sister carrying an enormous stack--she loved being stronger than I was--out to the car in the parking lot behind the library. It must have been late fall; the leaves were brown and mostly on the ground, but it wasn't cold. My mother's car was green; I can't remember which one, as they were almost always green.

I also remember the somewhat awkward and never entirely successful transition to the upstairs part of the library where the books for teenagers were kept in a nook off the main section, which was for adults. The books seemed alien and alienating to me, but tantalizing too, of course, maybe later on: full of things I didn't want to know about, like teenagers. I wasn't sure what teenagers did, beyond babysit, although occasionally I would skim one of these books with a scary-looking cover; there was one, in fact, with a babysitter who was--is this possible?--raped while she was babysitting? A Stranger in the House? Maybe I am mixing this up with something from a later time, but I do remember quite distinctly that some of the books seemed illicit, the paperbacks, especially. Anyway, my mother had gone to the same library as a child, and there was a part of the building that had been there since before she was born, and I can see myself standing on the edge of the balcony there trying, squinting with the effort of it, to imagine my mother at my age, which must have been about twelve.

Alison and I, at six and seven, were sitting in our basement playroom watching "Happy Days," which I can't imagine we really understood, eating hot dogs, which was also unusual, and there was somebody upstairs with our parents. For some reason, I think this is the night they told us we were moving. I have an intense memory of a feeling from when I first found out--a powerful wave of nausea and pain in my midsection as though I'd been punched in the gut. I wrote a song about the move, which I fought every step of the way and does, in hindsight, seem to have divided my childhood into early- and mid-, but I can't remember the lyrics.

I remember a day in kindergarten when we had to have some kind of vaccine administered at the school--I can't imagine they do that now--and having to go from the classroom, where we'd been doing something involving the letter A and the word "achoo" as in a sneeze, to the hallway, where a table was set up and we all had to wait in line. I was given a tiny plastic trinket afterward, perhaps some kind of animal?

The earliest memory I have, I think, is of sitting at a little table at my preschool having snack. The snack was graham crackers, and I suddenly became aware of my chewing, of the sound it made in particular, which seemed impossibly loud, and felt mortified that the children on either side of me were hearing it too. It's funny; I have gone over this memory so many times in my head that I'm not totally sure I can even recall the moment itself anymore or if I'm recalling my memories of remembering it--analagous somewhat to the way I sometimes think I am remembering something but am actually only remembering a photograph I've seen of it.