The other day I asked my six-year-old grandson if he remembered a time before his four-year-old brother was born.
“Nope,” he said. “He has always been around.”
“Really? You don’t have any memories from before him?”
Silence from the six-year-old.
“I wonder what your earliest memories are, then,” I said.
“I don’t know, but he was always in them.”
“Do you remember Tacoma?”
“Sure,” he said, but he was tiring of ‘the third degree,’ (as my own long-gone father would have called it). He gave me a look like he was about to clam up, but I couldn’t leave it alone.
“How about when I took you to the Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma? Just the two of us?”
“Yes. Bob-the-peacock!” he said. “We were walking and there he was, sitting on a rail!”
I could always count on mentioning Bob-the-Peacock to rally my grandson, but after that he said he was hungry - he’d just come to our house from a long first grade day, after all, and he still had his homework to face, so I finally let it go.
But had I ‘led the witness’, as it were, by making him have the memory I wanted him to have?
Of course I had, for if meeting ‘Bob-the-Peacock’ turns out to be his first memory, then even when he goes from six to seventy-six, I’ll be firmly stuck in his hippocampus, and not a shadow memory somewhere else in his brain, as my own grandparents (save one) are for me now.
My own first memories are myriad: I have one of a birthday cake with a plastic statue of Sergeant Preston of the Yukon on it; another of the tea parties I gave for my two invisible friends, both old ladies in overcoats; yet another of jumping into a pile of autumn leaves at the center of Tacoma’s Union Avenue; and, most especially, of listening to Teresa Brewer singing Music! Music! Music!
I know that last one was in 1950, because I just looked it up. So I was five at the time, fairly old to have a first memory. But I believe its lyric “Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon…” gave me my first sense of beauty in language. I even think that it planted, in me, the seed of using sound instead of intellect to carry power and meaning… a thing that I have tried to do in writing over my entire life.
“Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon…” I think it’s great how she gets away with singing ‘in’ three times.
You may say it’s only twice, but the final ‘on’ in ‘nickelodeon’ leans toward ‘in’… If you don’t believe me, go online and listen to it. Three ‘in’s in seven words! Fantastic!
Anyway, my point is that Teresa Brewer was the first to teach me to use my ear and not my eye or my mind when mining beauty. So when asked about influences in my fiction, should I not say ‘Brewer’ before Joyce, with his ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed’ or Thomas’s ‘Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs’ or Melville’s plucky ‘Call me Ishmael?’
I learned (or ‘stole’) from each of those guys during my years of wanting to be them… but Teresa Brewer, man… what she gave me is ingrained, almost at the cellular level.
Or maybe it’s just that she had bangs and I was five years old.
Which brings me back to Bob-the-Peacock, whose feathers stood out in an array of otherworldly glory for my grandson to behold. He fell back on his heels when he first saw him, a little out of fear, since Bob had the run of the place, but I think it also might have been his ‘Teresa Brewer’ moment, for now, at six, he is more aware of the colors of the world than I ever was, and he thinks of all birds and animals and sea creatures as his intimate friends, of nature as the terrain in which he wants to roam. He’s going trick or treating, this year, as the ghost of a colossal squid!
Think back now, to an essential moment in your early life, to your special tropism, to that moment when - almost at the cellular level - your particular reality was formed, impeaching the reality of those around you and offered you its embrace.
Was there such a time? I think there was for everyone, though in some it is as forgotten as that trip down the birth canal, as distant as our past lives.
But remembering what formed us is not the point I am trying to make…
Rather, it is to accept that embrace when it is offered, by putting another nickel in your own nickelodeon, and letting the tune that comes out of it be the one that you sing.
One of my very earliest memories, but not a cosy one, is from a little kindergarten I attended from age 3-5. Miss Harding, the owner and only teacher, kept hens and when we little ones reached the age of 4, she would let two of us go each day to bring the eggs in. One day I dropped one of them and it broke. I remember being, in turn, horrified, ashamed, embarrassed - and unable to think how to deal with the situation. I dealt with it in the worst possible way and am still ashamed: I told my companion (a boy) that he mustn't say a word about what happened. I think I terrified that poor little mite! What I don't recall is whether we said the hens were lazy that day or whether I perhaps blamed the breakage on the hens themselves. All I know is that I confessed to my mother on getting home, and she marched me in next morning to confess to Miss Harding and apologise, armed with an apology gift which was (very embarrassingly, I realized when older) a box of 6 eggs from our local grocery. Miss Harding was probably more horrified by that than by my lie. Lesson learned, anyway. Always 'fess up right away.
My earliest memories are all based on snapshots my parents took. I don't think I really remember the experience of sitting in a high chair and sipping my dad's beer or of climbing the cherry tree in our backyard in Reno, but those are my earliest images of myself, age 3-4, and they are both from snapshots I looked at over and over in my folks' album. What do I remember that was not from a snapshot? In kindergarten, knocking over the log cabin the girls had built. Because I got in trouble. That I remember. I think.