NON-MAUDLIN MEMORIES
Each one of us is a repository. Like flypaper, time and its detritus clings to us, often unknown except at a subliminal level. Allow me to troll the lake of my mind and give evidence of that gone except in mind. I recall adults telling us “Hey, kids get off my fender.” We no longer have cars with bulbous fenders, the ones we’d sit upon and talk to one another. Recently I went to Costco to buy 35mm film and the clerk had to redirect us to a nether shelf with a few boxes. Digital has been so completely successful that now I must seek out film like a hunter. Words have left the language — stoopball; potsy; “Chinese” boxball; boxball itself; Spaldeen; punchball; Fleer’s bubble gum; Studebaker; Hudson; Nash Metropolitan; Henry K; Kaiser-Frazer; Packard; dungarees, et al.
The movies of my children, late 40s through the 50s, are now either classics or forgotten nitrates resurrected, thank god, by DVDs. I grew up on Lamarr, Mature, Michael Rennie, George Sanders, Elizabeth Taylor, Hopalong Cassidy, Sidney Toler as Mr. Chan, Welles, Tyrone Power and Jack Hawkins, Sabu, Conrad Veidt, Mantan Moreland, Abbott and Costello, Bette Davis, Alan Ladd, Martin & Lewis, Donald O’Connor, Esther Williams, James Baskett (Song of the South), Novak, Pleshette, Stewart, Natalie Wood, Eva Marie Saint, Brando, Jean Simmons, Stewart Granger, not to mention all the films I caught on TV — Flash Gordon serials with Buster Crabbe; Hopalong Cassidy movies with William Boyd and the B oaters that starred Ken and Kermit Maynard, Tex Ritter, Autry and Rogers, Bob Steele, Tim Tyler, Buck Jones, McCoy, and early Wayne westerns. Movie candies were of the time, Jujy Fruits, Non-Pareils, Bon Bons, Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy, JuJubes and Dots.
I walk around with all this sweet and cloying if not sentimental stuff in me. It is all context, that’s about it. We each grow different kinds of feathers at different times in our lives. Early readings stay with us and we can recall where and when we read a particularly eventful book. We smile inwardly at our childhood environments and we are often touched. When I was a cab driver back in 1969 -1972 in New York, I eventually mastered the ins and outs of Central Park and the oddly S shaped Broadway as well as the cross streets. Similarly as a child I learned the neighborhood like the proverbial back of my hand. I could go back now and within a few minutes know my way about although new homes have filled in the “lots” we used to play in and roast “mickies,” potatoes, in the cold of February. I was connected, like a farmer, to the “soil” of this urban world. I knew when it was the season to play two-hand touch football, marbles, to fly kites, to make orange crate box scooters; to pluck berries from trees to use as ammo in our slingshots made from wire hangars and the back of mom’s nylons. We plundered the neighborhood of riches, like migrant workers cherrypicking the best of the fruit. We were earnest scavengers too busy and intent on doing this than to ever really cause mischief. We had purpose and there was meaning in play. We were always outside and hated to come in which apparently is the opposite of today in which the computer glues kids to the monitor.
Like all generations, it was the best and worst of times, and what we grew up with we are favorable to and give meaning to in our memories and our nostalgia. As I grow older I often return to those days of radio listening — Tom Mix, The Lone Ranger, Superman, Inner Sanctum –of parents moving about in memory, of school and the street. Quite normal to return to connection and relationship. I felt then that I was a nut within a snug shell, comforting and secure. Out of this nexus all my writing flows. I really believe what other writers have said is that we tell one story and we repeat that story in many variations throughout our lives. I will try to pause here and see the unfathomable which is what song I needed sung. I believe that I was not registered by my parents. I was not “felt” by them so that I grew up thinking that this is the way in this home and probably in other homes. Centuries later in terms of psychic time a close friend and brilliant therapist told me that I needed to be “felt.” Yes, I needed to be felt. The sadness in my life is the knowledge that if encouraged, if nourished I would have placed my palms upon the heavens. Since that was not forthcoming all of my life has been my self-parenting myself — but that is what is. I have made my “peace” with that but that is a self-lie I tell myself to get on with life. When I die all my lies and all my myths die with me. The realities go equally dead as well, for what person or persons can read the sorrows of another.
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