I guess I have
to begin at birth. I am not one to
remember pain but then again maybe nobody at birth knew how to identify
pain. Somehow it got stored in some
miscellaneous data base until it could be identified and archived.
Surely females,
when then give birth, feel the pain their mothers felt when they gave
birth. Not to say females understand
what the infant feels. Of course,
infants for the most part cry being thrown out of warm liquid comfort zone and
forced to change environments on a survive or die scale.
Perhaps for an
infant, ignorance is a blessing. That
absolute no going back, you’re here, live with it, do or die, birth moment is
best forgotten and left uncategorized and uncompared to any other.
Still I have
wondered through the years, that maybe that Yung thing in psychology is the
first two years of your life in data collecting still rumbling around
uncatalogued or not capable of being catalogued later in life. It is lost data. It was useful data as is, at the moment, in
the moment kind of way. It was perhaps
also strung together in memory, in hours or daily loops of learned behavior communication,
which did not make it to the final eye opening totally present, that each of us
marks our backward history by.
In a way it is
not like riding a bike now in the present.
It is, the past, all that compressed, forgotten attempts to ride the bike
fully. To put together desire, passion,
balance and perfect flight marks a multiple intersection of data rather than
any one or few strings of data or memory.
Who, on the moon
in a space suit and walking around a whole new environment remembers the first
few days of flight training as a cadet?
I started this
subject with birth and I guess I have to in this outer waiting room to the
afterlife have to reconcile the mother thing. Life begins with mom. Our earliest habits, tastes and behaviors
mimic the person we first saw after birth and the one we clung to both before
and after that birth.
With mom, it is
difficult to reconcile the thing. I am
looking back. I am using adult prejudice
and adult preferences in dealing with, dissecting and commented on past memory
data.
In a way there
always was a distance between myself and my mother.
I begin to see
her face in silhouette.
The scene is a seemingly
rare moment when she acted out of the normal. In fact I have probably played
this scene over in my mind through the years and seem to know all the facts
underlying that scene now.
I am four years
old. We are walking to a nearby
playground. In my mind I have always
known it was gray blustery March. The
impressive tall Schlichter clock tower over the old Schlichter rope factory
dominates its surroundings as it has done since before the Civil War. In fact, this building had supplied a very
large percentage of the rope and rigging that ran the U.S. Navy in their
blockade of the South during that war.
The playground
is quiet, empty on a school day. Seeding
will be done in another month or two to replace the grass on one baseball
diamond on the space. Years later my research would reveal that this playground
for factory workers’ children, had at one time been a black chimney belching
mill just like Schlichter’s.
The cyclone
fence surrounding the playground is rusting just like the batting cage surrounding
home plate of the baseball diamond.
One sole small
building housing the boys and girls bathrooms and the groundskeeper’s office
and supply closet sat sadly on the lot.
Nearby were two sliding boards, one small and the other large for bigger
bids. So too were a set of swings, one
junior and one senior.
One “Jack and
Jill” with stairs, platform, monkey bars and broad slide, with its gazebo like
roof over the platform completed this working class recreation scene in
Harrowgate, Philadelphia.
Next to the
playground as a boundary marker and artificial wall was the elevated embankment
of a factory feeder train track, the Trenton Avenue line. The embankment was beyond more rusting
cyclone fence and the large chunks of gravel on the embankment seemed to carry
the black accent of coal dust and train soot of over half a century.
Into this
cheerless, colorless, world, comes my mother with a four year old boy and a one
and half year old sister, trying to do something different in her life. Perhaps
her day trip was some kind of out of the box of a row house life experience,
that house only some three or four blocks over.
Was this trip
into the cold March day an escape from her depression? Got to mention the depression. She suffered from it and my father too.
Of course,
nobody in those days went to see a shrink to talk about depression. The thing was not called mental health. You were either crazy or not. Any problems, you talk to the priest. Salvation of the soul was more important than
any mental health issues. Right?
I am looking
back at my mother on this day. I have looked
back at this day as sort of a singular photo.
In a way all the millions of images available on TV, the internet, used
to only be available in books and or encyclopedias.
In a way I am
not framing this moment in a black and white photo thing in a photo album. This image in the wind of the day is my Prada
image, touchstone image on which all other images and memories have to go
through as a gateway in and out of my own personal archive of memory and
imprints on my soul.
Is this what it
is all about? Condensing? Compressing?
Memory? A life? One life. A soul.
Well, the Prada
image that should have been painted by a Goya both in normal tones and lights
as well as in the maddening images that only a Goya later in life, and crazy
from the lead in his paints, could paint.
Don’t I deserve
a Prada or a Louvre to store the treasures of my life? Am I not the king of my destiny? Was the king
of…
This
reconciliation with mom and her issues that overlapped with my own issues in
living never had a simple ending, a typical ending, a final closure….
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Mike, this is beautifully and evocatively written. It helped me understand your reference at my site to the Prada moment.
ReplyDeleteI'm intrigued by your reflections (which are compelling) about how we come into the world perhaps programmed to know pain, but without experiential triggers to know what it is we feel until experience comes along to orient us--and pull the triggers.
I am sorry to read of your mother's depression. I can relate. I can relate specifically to the way in which that makes a child who senses it early on in his/her mother wary, burdened, unable to name what it is, precisely, that weighs so heavily.
Colors of gray in many childhood memories. Days of high wind and loneliness. Empty playgrounds. Nearby chimneys belching dark smoke.
I understand, in my own way, from my own experience with my mother. You are fortunate to have a gift of writing to exorcise some of the demons, which can plague a body through many, many years.