Remembrance of Times Past
Occasionally a fleeting childhood memory will pop into the back of my head--a pleasant memory for the most part, a gratuitous bit of history that illuminates, like a match in the night darkness, the inaccessible world I inhabited 60 years ago. The snapshots mostly come when I am relaxed or unbothered by some task or activity. And the time stamp of the memories vary widely--mostly from the tender years, but also in the grad school library, or revving out of sand by the side of a Florida road, as if someone had taken a box of photographs and dumped them on the floor.
Occasionally a fleeting childhood memory will pop into the back of my head--a pleasant memory for the most part, a gratuitous bit of history that illuminates, like a match in the night darkness, the inaccessible world I inhabited 60 years ago. The snapshots mostly come when I am relaxed or unbothered by some task or activity. And the time stamp of the memories vary widely--mostly from the tender years, but also in the grad school library, or revving out of sand by the side of a Florida road, as if someone had taken a box of photographs and dumped them on the floor.
They are not particularly unusual memories or spectacular in any way, but have been encoded or evoked in a random way, and have survived on the internal neural web. I regard most of them as pleasant minivacations into an absurdly uniformly happy childhood. On the negative side, they remind me of how much of childhood memory is inaccessible and will remain so.
One pop-up memory is of when a child, walking on Jones or Long Beach in New York with my father. Maybe I was five or six? I remember being low to the ground and Dad way up there superimposed again a glowing sky. He had baggy shorts style swimsuit as was the fashion of the day. I remember venturing with him closer to the waves, staggering along in the sand. The towel was yards back--a striped, flaglike affair with fringes, and a few aluminum chairs around which I usually stayed nearby. This venture to the water was an anomaly for me, since I was not much of a swimmer. Personality wise, Dad was sort of a Rock of Gibralter, which provided confidence near the loud crashing waves.
One pop-up memory is of when a child, walking on Jones or Long Beach in New York with my father. Maybe I was five or six? I remember being low to the ground and Dad way up there superimposed again a glowing sky. He had baggy shorts style swimsuit as was the fashion of the day. I remember venturing with him closer to the waves, staggering along in the sand. The towel was yards back--a striped, flaglike affair with fringes, and a few aluminum chairs around which I usually stayed nearby. This venture to the water was an anomaly for me, since I was not much of a swimmer. Personality wise, Dad was sort of a Rock of Gibralter, which provided confidence near the loud crashing waves.
A radio is heard--is it ours or another beachgoers? I can't remember. There was a cult of small black transistor radios at the beach, really everywhere, in those days. The newscaster was announcing, in a deep metallic voice, "Syphilis, the scourge of mankind is over." The newscast concerned use of newer antibiotics and the ability to treat the disease.
What an interesting word, I though. "Scourge". What was a scourge? And what was syphilis? I asked dad, "what is syphilis?" Without pause, rather too quickly, he said, "a disease." I persisted, "how do you get it." I remember him say, way up there, looking straight ahead, as quickly as possible, as if to squeeze all the uncomfortable syllables into as brief a moment as possible, in a somewhat strangulated voice, "sexual contact," and striding ahead. Oh no, why did I ask that, I thought. And suddenly, the memory fades.
What a position to have put my father in, but I appreciated him speaking to me in such a scientific manner. And I appreciate that the situation was impactful and sufficiently uncomfortable to have last over 60 years and breathed a small video into my otherwise more laborious pictorial reconstructions of the past.
A second transistor radio/Dad memory also occurs to me. Once, with brother Joe, we returned to Dad's convertible--a 1962 blue Oldsmobile. It was hot. I think we had seen a long WWII movie. Joe's transistor radio was gone. The top was up and locked, held by a finger chomping metal buckle mechanism above the windshield, so that was strange--how did the thief get in. Examining, though, the plastic back window, we found a perfect T had been incised into the plastic, and apparently, the thief had inserted some long apparatus that hooked and removed the radio or pulled up the open door plug. The plastic was very thick, so the knife must have been sharp--a meticulous thief. The incision was quite neat and perfectly angular
And, now by association, a third memory of Joe/Dad/Transistor Radio occurs. My recollection is of my father's soured face ordering Joe to turn off the radio as "Blue Moon" by the Marcells, which was playing repetitively on the channel played at that time. Joe may have been singing along. Irritation had been building up with each repetition of the song--but this is where the memory drifts off into foggy confabulation--if it hadn't done so already.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0fy1HeJv80
A second transistor radio/Dad memory also occurs to me. Once, with brother Joe, we returned to Dad's convertible--a 1962 blue Oldsmobile. It was hot. I think we had seen a long WWII movie. Joe's transistor radio was gone. The top was up and locked, held by a finger chomping metal buckle mechanism above the windshield, so that was strange--how did the thief get in. Examining, though, the plastic back window, we found a perfect T had been incised into the plastic, and apparently, the thief had inserted some long apparatus that hooked and removed the radio or pulled up the open door plug. The plastic was very thick, so the knife must have been sharp--a meticulous thief. The incision was quite neat and perfectly angular
And, now by association, a third memory of Joe/Dad/Transistor Radio occurs. My recollection is of my father's soured face ordering Joe to turn off the radio as "Blue Moon" by the Marcells, which was playing repetitively on the channel played at that time. Joe may have been singing along. Irritation had been building up with each repetition of the song--but this is where the memory drifts off into foggy confabulation--if it hadn't done so already.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0fy1HeJv80
