In Search For Beginnings

Nostalgia has a bad name; always has. Longing for the imagined past can be a delusional exercise or at least a sentimental journey. In the 17^th century it was regarded as a sickness, a form of melancholia suffered by seaman who couldn’t wait to return home. Try getting your HMO to cover that.

Yet, raise your hand if you don’t replay those glory years. That home run I hit in the schoolyard is still orbiting a distant galaxy. The older I get, the better I used to be.   

I like a beer now and then but can’t tell the difference between Schlitz, Pabst, Miller or Modello. Yet, I also can’t forget one of their old commercials…which shows what sort of programs I watched. We only go around once in life and should therefore (spend our remaining days drinking Schlitz beer) or as he put it… live it with all the gusto you can.

What about harps and wings sprouting from my shoulders? Sounds like heresy to me and I’ll drink to that.

One man’s gusto is another’s big yawn. At the moment my attention is turned back to how I got from there to here; the breadcrumbs of my madeleine. I have always associated the recovery of time past as a personal detective story and a comedy. I think of Peter Falk as Colombo - Columbus in his crumpled overcoat discovering the new world called Truth or beginnings. There’s just one more thing…

Maybe this comes from seeing too many movies as a kid. The intrepid sleuth snooping, the black sedan trailing him, the goon holding up the lamppost across the street, getting bopped in the alley, everyone a suspect and all of them assembled in the last scene. The detective deduces and detects. He unravels the essential mystery at the core as if now I know why my brother died early, why my father could barely read, and my mother trusted no one or... how I was gifted with three loving daughters having stumbled and bumbled my way along and then got so lucky.

It's not fair that we’re allotted only one childhood, and we are too busy living it to have taken notes. Maybe that’s what old age is for. To rewrite everything I should have said and the dumb things I shouldn’t have, those years of zits and scars.

Julian Barnes wrote, A child wants to see. He was able to walk and could reach up to a door handle. He did this with nothing in mind that could be called a purpose, merely the instinctive tourism of infancy. A door was there to be pushed; he walked in, stopped, and looked.

In my infantile tourism I am at a window about three flights up looking down. A car is on fire, and I hear sirens coming. Across the street there is a derrick moving dirt and bricks are being laid. Another apartment house is going up.

I’m not so sure anymore about the car fire because I may be confusing it with my Little Red Fire Engine book. The dirt-mover is certain. It is on Talbot Street. in Kew Gardens, and I am between 3 and 4. Why that image while thousands of other sights have been shredded? It was unusual enough to be retained and when I see bricks mortared today it comes back to me. How does this figure in the detective story?

Guilt. Something went wrong. I wonder what I did or didn’t. I was a poor eater. I violated the clean plate policy. Serious stuff. People were starving in China… because of me. I wasn’t listening. Didn’t wear galoshes. That third sweater. Went out unprotected. No wonder I got measles, mumps, whooping cough, even scarlet fever. What about polio? Don’t go swimming. And head lice? Don’t lean back on the movie chair. Don’t. Don’t. How will I ever remember all these don’ts?

The don’ts get embedded. I fight for every Do. The derrick moves the dirt. I climb the hill, gradually find my gusto. Case closed………but not so fast. I wouldn’t do that if I were you.