Last night, I started reading Jubilee City: A Memoir at Full Speed by Joe Andoe. He explains early on (or in the enclosed presskit - thanks NyQuil Girl!) that he started to write the book because someone had interrupted him as he was about to recount a chunk of his life by saying "You've told me this one before". Thusly spurred into action, each time he found himself telling a story, he wrote it down as well.
'Huh. Good idea!" I thought.
Earlier in the day for some other reason, I had remembered the first two concrete memories I possess - I must have been 1 or 2. The first, more spectacular, involved me and a tricycle which my mom had dragged from our walk-up apartment to let me ride on the sidewalk in front.
It was a cold and gray autumn day - kinda like now, so maybe that's why it popped into my head - and the sidewalk and street were very quiet. I'm not certain now how it happened - I was probably goofing off - but the trike and I flipped backward.
The absolute strongest memory I have now of that moment, nearly four decades ago is this: lying on my back on the cold sidewalk and marvelling how the bare branches of the trees on the treelawn formed such a beautiful and graceful arch above the street and sidewalk. Common sense (and my own parenthood, years later) tells me there must have been tremendous crying and upset on my part, but the thing I remember above all is the tree branches, so high above me, meeting above the street after starting at treetrunks on either side below.
A much more elegiac scene than the other earliest memory, I'm afraid, in which I'm sitting in my highchair enjoying a lunchtime repast of hotdogs and red Kool-Aid. I guess I'm old enough to have an open cup of the sugary nectar, but, on the other hand, maybe not, because I'm incessantly dipping a small die-cast fire engine in it, much to my mother's disapproval.
It's a weird part of me being a parent now that I can remember situations like these and what I was thinking while making the unfathomable decisions that I decided - and how that sometimes (rarely) gives me some insight into what's making my own offspring tick.
I was in a car accident once, and my main memory of it is not the pain, not the helicopter, not the sensation of dropping out the passenger door, but the way the tree branches looked above me as I stared up from the ground. Honestly, I think about those branches all the time, and how lovely they looked, and how I'd never noticed their beauty before.
So. Maybe it's a shock thing?
We had one of them trikes that flipped backward; it was the design, you couldn't help but topple onto your noggin staring at front wheel and pedals spin like duck feet above you.
At the time of my mother's fender-bender, when I was about 4, all I did was weep selfishly that my little metal cup of redhots had spilled all over the back seat floor. Poor, poor boy.
Oh yeah, and the mantle of boughes. This I experienced in full lying down in the backseat on the drive to Gramma and Grampa's. (The body cannot distinguish between distress and eustress.) Such pleasant trauma.
On the day my erstwhile bf and I broke up in Seattle, we were on a roadtrip. If you've ever been out there, you know the thick tree canopy situation. When you're in the car and if there's a sunroof...all you see is tree branches with a little bit of sky. Jeremy will tell you how awfully upset I was about that breakup...but now...all I can think of is the overwhelming, heartstopping beauty of the treetops as we sped along, together for the last time. Shock...yes. But mebbe it's the NyQuil too. :) --NQ Gurl
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