Earliest Memory

I can still hear those sirens and smell the smoke. I was between three and four years old watching a car ablaze from my third story window. I saw the red truck with a big hose and the flames. I’ll never forget it. Too bad it never happened.

For about eight decades I regarded this scene as my earliest memory. Then it occurred to me that I had a picture book about fire engines. Those images flew off the page and torched the parked car three stories below.

Better yet, I can mark that moment as when I felt the power of books sufficient to spark my imagination. A year or two later I learned how those squiggles on the page called words could ignite my inscape and make the world luminous.

Returning to that window I do remember a new apartment building going up across the street. There was a derrick, mounds of earth and bricks were stacked up.

The entire block was to be a series of five story apartments except for one house with chickens in the front yard. Over time we played marbles in the dirt where the chickens were partitioned off. I was introduced, without ceremony, to this tribe called children. It was an aural culture with unwritten rules passed from the ten-year-old elders to us little tots.

There was a rhythm to street games from stoop ball to hopscotch to double Dutch jump rope. We had our own benevolent leaders who knew a small something that allowed the flock to cohere, until one day they outgrew us, and the hierarchy shifted without a peep.

Written words would overthrow the oral, but language of the street still has echoes for me long after it vanished into chalk dust or flew away in the smoke, higher than a pop fly.