Memories Are a Thing of the Past

In my fifties, I began to think I ought to write my memoir. I’m unsure why I thought this, except maybe because everyone else seemed to be writing one. Around the 1990’s, memoir writing became a thing. It is now its own genre. It seems now that you haven’t lived if you haven’t written it down. At any rate, I did not write anything down. Still too busy living what would make up a memoir. Also, I was unable to imagine capturing my whole up-to-then life. I could not see the whole. It all seemed enormous. It also, contradictorily, all seemed rather short and trivial. A little life. Nothing really big—nothing like surviving cruel and crazy parents, or achieving sainthood, or assuming a political life. And no (seemingly necessary for a memoir) really, really big trauma. Also, I came to think that writing one’s memoir was somehow narcissistic. Unless you were Proust, maybe you should just shut up. Also, alas, laziness might have played a part in my reluctance to sit down and write. 

But now I am eighty-five and I review my life every day in my head. Bits of it, anyway. And not intentionally. Memories just float up in my head in no chronological order. It’s something the elderly do, whether they want to or not. Little memories, like vignettes, appear all the time. And mine are, for the most part, only marginally interesting, and only to me. But today I’m thinking that, really, it’s now or never that I write my memoir, because never is probably coming up soon. 

But how to begin? I learned from a colleague last week that we don’t make memories until we’re around four years old. The past, before four, is one big nothing. I checked this out and opinions vary—some sources say we remember things from two years old or earlier. Salvador Dali claimed to remember being in the womb, but I don’t believe him. If he remembers just bobbing around in amniotic fluid, growing fingers and toes, sucking his thumb (some embryos suck their thumb), then good for him. I just don’t believe him. And if I did come to believe him at some point (if I got high or buzzed enough), I know I would think, “So what?” That womb scene is quite the bore.

Okay. So here’s the memory that absorbed me this morning as I was sitting in Quest Laboratory waiting for my bi-annual blood test. After sifting through the mulch of my grey matter, I remembered a time when I was around four. My mother, to the left of me,  and I were sitting at the soda fountain in Pinault’s Drugstore in Pawtucket. I think that I was eating Honeydew melon ice-cream. (That’s probably safe to claim as a true memory, since that is the only flavor I would eat until I was 18.). An old lady in a feathered hat and red, red lipstick, sat down on the stool on my right. She clucked at me, her face a mere two inches from mine. Her breath smelled like what my father drank in the evenings. She said, “Oh, you are such a darling!” Then,“Isn’t she a darling?” to my mother (who knew better). And she continued fawning over me: “Such a pretty little girl! Where did you get those big blue eyes? Your hair is like an angels’s. I could eat you up!” On and on she went, coos and exclamations from that red, red mouth that looked like a bleeding ulcer. And I, I stared at her, and, with no reason for doing what I did, stuck out my tongue at her as far as it would go. She uttered a small “Oh” and drew back from my face. She stopped her panegyric. My mother did not see. And all was well with the ice-cream outing.

Except that I have remembered that scene with shame all my life. The poor woman, probably lonely and alone, probably wishing she had a pet with blue eyes. But what do I know about her motives? If I were thirty when I did that, I would attribute my tongue action to my dislike of drivel. To my preference of realism and rationalism over fakery and obsequiousness. And maybe it’s possible that, at four years old, there were already the seeds of that sentiment in my post-amnesiac brain. 

Years go by. Years I don’t remember. But here I am, in Quest still, with a needle in my arm and my blood filling a little plastic vat. The removal of a component of my body jogs another memory of my long-gone past.

I was five, and fooling around on the front grass with Eddie White and Sonny Wilde of the same age. One of them had brought a pair of kid’s scissors and we were busy exercising a kid’s natural response to scissors—cutting things. A piece of a flyer which had landed in the gutter. Leaves off the hydrangea bushes. Then the hydrangea flowers. Then a patch of grass near the drainpipe. Etcetera. We were running out of things to cut when Sonny started sing-songing, “Cut your hair, double-dare! Cut your hair, double dare!” 

I was born with hair. Transparent hair. My mother would always say, “You were almost an albino.” At five, the hair was down to my shoulders. It was not so much Sonny’s dare—I was always up for a dare—but the idea itself, the interestingness of it, the something-I-had-never-done-before of it, that made me do it. I started cutting. The soft scrunch sound of the hair being shorn. The snappy clip-clipping sound of the scissors. The wonder and excitement of amputating a part of me. The exciting, almost ecstatic feeling of doing something that, deep-down, I intuited was something I should not be doing. Long strands of white hair lay on the grass—albino eels. Eddie hung some locks like Christmas tinsel in the pine tree. It was amusing, so I kept going. Sonny took some and held it under his nose like a Fu Manchu moustache. White tresses drifted off and stuck in the willow tree. And then my mother came home.

I do not remember any anger on her part. She probably assumed that my resulting ugliness was punishment enough. Still and all, my feeling was one of diluted fear, and loving it. My mild anxiety was mixed with a sense of derring-do and wildness. I was feeling secretly valorous. Feeling proud. (There it is, that “narcissistic memoir”problem!) I do not remember feeling ugly afterwards, though I looked like a Naked mole-rat. It felt good, actually, to be rid of all that hair that summer.

And that’s the sum of what I remember of my childhood. Should I get an agent?

Norah Christianson is an 85 y.o.female, somewhat educated, has 2 children, 31 house plants, 5 antique clocks, 12 dazzling affairs, and a raccoon in a pine treeeeee! She has lived in Stratford for 55 years, has published 6 books of poetry, won the Academy of American Poets Prize (pen name “Norah Pollard”), and teaches Creative Writing at Bridge House in Bridgeport CT.