Trying to Remember My Childhood, Over 50 Years Ago
It’s Not True That the Distant Past Is Crystal Clear
They say older people remember things in the past very clearly but are fuzzy on the present. While I don’t enjoy admitting it, turning 63 definitely puts me in the “older” category, yet I’m remembering day-to-day events just fine. My childhood, not so much.
I remember climbing the grapefruit tree, which had long, sharp spines so you had to be careful. I remember Dad putting up a swing set in the backyard, and our wire-haired terrier named Frisky. I remember the one and only time it snowed in Fresno, and Mom put Dad’s socks over our shoes (no idea why) and the ice built up inside the toes and made icy pompoms on our feet, and there wasn’t even enough snow to build a snowman.
I remember coming home in tears after my first day in kindergarten, because I hadn’t learned to read. But after that rocky start, I loved everything about school. (Except maybe Home Ec in Junior High; so not me. I was the only person ever to accidentally make green muffins. I had wanted to take Shop, but they didn’t allow girls to take it in those days. Girls couldn’t wear pants to school, either.)
I remember one evening Mom and Dad were deeply distressed, but wouldn’t say why. I thought it was something about money, because they sometimes had fiercely whispered conversations in their bedroom about money, but the next day at school I learned that our President, John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated.
When I was 5 years old, I told Mom and Dad that I wanted to learn to play the piano. They said my hands were too small and I had to wait until I was 8. I never said another word about it, but on my 8th birthday, I jumped out of bed and ran around the whole house, then had a temper tantrum, yelling, “You promised! You promised when I was 8 I could have a piano!” My parents were flabbergasted that I remembered, and took me to pick out a piano and signed me up for lessons that very day. I loved my lessons, and I loved practicing after school every day, which within a few years I did for two hours on weekdays and up to six on the weekends until I graduated high school.
I remember the first thing in color we ever saw on TV was “The Wizard of Oz,” and we were totally blown away because the movie starts in black and white, just like everything else we’d ever seen, but then when Dorothy opens the door of her farmhouse to Oz, everything’s in color! That sense of amazement and wonder sticks with me to this day.
I remember not being allowed to go see the Beatles’ last concert in San Francisco with family friends, and being so furious that I broke three dozen eggs all over the walls and ceiling of the kitchen after Mom had gone to bed. Dad woke up early and cleaned it all up and said, “let’s not tell your Mother about this, all right?” I was mad at her for decades, until I finally looked back and realized I would only have been 9 years old in 1966. (I’d been obsessed with the Beatles since I was 6.)
When I was 10, Dad took a sabbatical for a year to go back to school in Moscow, Idaho, to get a higher degree, and Mom worked in the Audio-Visual Department of the college, so after school she would set me up to watch college science videos, like blood circulation or the rain-evaporation cycle, and I loved all those, too. There was a little girl in that town who wanted to beat me up, Renata, so my piano teacher drove me home from lessons.
Mom wasn’t very domestic and Dad wasn’t very handy, but every day we had supper together and talked about what we’d experienced that day and also about world events. I was expected to have an opinion, and there were many lively discussions at our table.
Aside from loving school and piano, I don’t remember many details of my childhood in Fresno. The main thing I remember about my childhood and youth was summers at Lake Tahoe. They were idyllic, it was purely a Huck Finn existence, playing in the woods all morning and swimming in the lake all afternoon. I don’t think I even missed my piano because it was so much fun, and because the days were timeless and endless: no TV, no radio except Dad’s firefighter alert radio, no clock except the sun, and no awareness of calendar days passing. Every day was just today, a perfect day for adventure!
For more memories of Lake Tahoe, read here:
I may not have many discrete memories of my childhood and youth, but the one theme that ties them all together was knowing how much Mom and Dad loved me. That was always in the background, and I always felt safe and protected and cherished.
Even though I don’t remember a lot of details, I remember my childhood was wonderful.
