First Memories (Published May 23, 2022)

  First Memories


I have lots of memories from old pictures.  Some of these pictures have stories I’ve been told, or at least I think I’ve been told.  Sometimes I see a picture and really have no memory of it.  There is a picture of my five-year-old birthday.  Several children surround a swingset in a backyard.  I have no real memory of any of the children, nor the swing set, nor the birthday.  My only memory is my parents telling me they invited kids from my old house, as we had just moved to a new house.  But really, I have no memory of that birthday at all.  There’s a much later birthday when I am around ten or eleven of three friends and myself at Dodger Stadium.  At this point, I can only recognize two of the three friends.  I have no idea who the third one is.  I remember sitting in the bleachers, turning around, and having a home run hit me in the arm. That's my total memory of the day.

There are some situations I have no real memory of other than the stories told to me that becomes a memory in themselves.  Some neighbors, with the last name of Ashkenazi.  We lived down from them when I was six.  I can remember the mom’s name, Mariam, and the son, my age, named Kenney.  I can tell you all kinds of stories about them.  The younger son cut off the tail of a cat and my mom thought him disturbed, the father was a pilot, the father always drove VW bugs while other Jews would not buy German products, Mariam’s hair was bright red and matched my moms, and that they lived next to my parents when I was born.  Actually, I remembered it as my mom and Mariam were pregnant together, which I now know was obviously wrong!    But to be honest I have no memory of them at all and wonder why I remember such trivial facts about people I have never seen again. 

Memories that are not associated with pictures or family stories must be my own.  Seeing a giant snake laying across the door to a motel room.   Throwing wet towels at a wasp nest to knock it down and then diving under the water and swimming quickly away.  Catching a gopher and putting it in a cage, like it was a pet, only to find it dead the next day.  Riding the streetcar with my grandmother.  Playing BINGO and having my grandmother’s parakeet repeat “B-6” 

Two early stories stand out.  One is when I am six and sick in bed.  I am not sure now if it was the measles or whooping cough.  I discovered music and the radio.  There was an AM station with a little jingle “KGIL in the Valley”.  I remember listening to that station for what seemed an eternity.  As I got a little better and could get out of bed, I discovered and played LP records for the first time in my life.  I also turned the radio dial trying to identify all the stations I could find.  I pretended to be a DJ making announcements of upcoming songs and singing jingles of advertisements that were popular at the time as I had heard them on KGIL.  Maybe that is why I still sing all these strange jingles for no known reason.

The earliest story I can remember is being in a park and looking up at radio towers.  I am guessing, but do not know for sure that I was about four.   I can, to this day, picture these radio towers and the cables that held them up.  For much of my childhood, I had reoccurring dreams that centered around these radio towers.  I would wander and wander and wander and then come to the radio towers.  The dreams always seem to end there.  My guess, and it is only a guess, is that I was lost in the park.  For how long I really do not know.  If I found my own way back to who was watching me, or if they found me, or if a stranger found me and guided me back, I really do not know, I am guessing that I must have been traumatized to some degree to continually have this dream of wandering and the towers.  I believe I was in the park with my grandmother but do not even know that for sure.  I believe it is a park in Burbank or Glendale.  Maybe I should seek out the park next week when we go to Los Angeles.  It's sort of my ET moment,  as ET looks up and says "ET Phone Home" 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A memory about pets (Published Sept 13, 2021)

 The first pet I was aware of was my parents dog Taffy, a Chihuahua. Taffy died when I was around six and my mom almost immediately went to the pound and got a dog named Jinxy, I'm not sure why the name and if we named her or if she came with that name. Jinxy was a white, with some brown, Fox Terrier mix. She was a great dog but had two problems. The first is that she always urinated when anyone pet her. And when the door bell rang and she ran to the door excited, there was always an accident including urinating on several guests shoes. Because of this, Jinxy was confined to the service porch with our washer and dryer or the backyard. This leads to the second issue - She loved breaking out of the yard and run (sort of like Almas). Not to long after we got Jinxy, my parents did get another Chihuahua, which they named Chico. Jinxy was "my dog" while Chico was my parents. The dogs got along well and I've got cute pictures of them laying together. However, Chico always ha...
Read more

THE PACKAGE

  THE PACKAGE One day this package just arrived on our doorstep.  It did not look like the customary Amazon package we get at our door many days each month.   It had no return address, and my name was typed on an address label with no logo.  There was no postage on the wrapping and no indication that it was from FedEx, UPS, or any of the other courier services.  Perhaps a neighbor dropped off a gift, but why then the formal typed label?    The package was rather large and rather heavy.  There was no noise from shaking it so it was wrapped rather tightly.  There clearly was a box inside the wrapping.  My first inclination was to open it immediately but then I decided to wait for Susan in case she knew what it was or ordered it.  Perhaps she had ordered it specifically for me or for some occasion?   Susan arrived back from the market.  She had no idea what it was.  She had not ordered anything. Susan laughed a...
Read more

The Summer after the Summer of Love, Part I (Published Augst 23, 2021)

It was the Summer after the Summer of Love, 1968, I was eighteen, and five of us jammed into my 1961 Chevy Corvair and headed to San Francisco, the then action spot of the world as far as the five of us teens were concerned. Interstate 5 was not yet open all the way to "SF" as we in Los Angeles called it. There were almost no has stations and the freeway would stop and start taking you onto the old California Highway 33. It was along one these stretches of Highway 33, reminiscent of a John Steinbeck novel, that the car ran out of gas. I remember that Louise, my high school prom date was already not in the best of moods and running out of call in the middle of nowhere land did not help. Besides, it was after dark and about 110 degrees outside, at least so it seemed. The cars in those days had no air conditioning, or at least my old Corvair did not. After taking the rath from everyone in the car for not filling it sooner, an old man in 1950's pickup came along and offered m...
Read more