Barely Was There Barley

Sharing old memories with middle daughter, Lauren, we went through family albums. As in most, the last twenty pages or thereabout were blank filled in by images we’ve carried around so long they might even be true.

I reminded her of those hard times when some people slept on the floor but we were so poor we didn’t have a floor. How the temperature reached 23 below on the Great Plains and we stayed warm by getting cabin fever. She reminded me she was born in Granada Hills where it was so hot she saw two trees fighting over a dog.

I recalled how we lived as gypsies around the campfire where she learned the fiddle at age three and was later first violinist with Leonard Bernstein conducting. She could only recount her accordion lessons with Harvey Goldstein and how she quit after two sessions.

We reminisced about our days in the circus where we performed as the Flying Levines and perfected the Triple Lutz-Half Gainer, with a twist of lemon, without a net. She had a faint memory of riding on an elephant while twirling eleven plates.

She regressed us to a past life in which I was her daughter, half Iroquois, half Mohawk and half Mohegan. I was the next to last. The two of us warned the tribe, too late, not to sell Manhattan to the Dutch but if they do, to get on Antiques Roadshow with those trinkets.

We both remembered the day I taught her that 8 plus 6 equals 14 by leaping up a flight of stairs or maybe that was 3 plus 2. We couldn't agree whether I was reading her Three Blind Mice when she was 4 or Four and Twenty Blackbirds when she was 3.

Missing is the picture of her taking a journey inside a watermelon or the story of how she went through childhood with a white mustache after piling extra powdered sugar on her French toast.

Even if it never happened we still talk about those days crossing the prairie with nary and barely was there barley.