The following is a reconnection about recollections, in this case the earliest ones. I have my own early memory of my mother and my sister gazing down at me in my crib. They really seemed to like me. My brother Michael remembers something more active.
Michael:
The Early Days
I was born broke and wet. I don’t remember it, of course, but I can put two and two together. The broke park I can’t say I minded. After all, I had sponsors from the get-go. Patrons, you might say. I was given free milk and not required to sit on any toilet seat. Thankfully. At that size I no doubt would have fallen in and drowned. My story would have been decidedly shorter.
The wet part? Now that’s another matter. I didn’t swim around in an air tight chamber for eight or nine months in the spirit of voluntarism. A couple of lovers who I later came to refer to as mom and dad put me in that predicament. I kicked around quite a bit in those months in protest - at least according to my mom. Those weren’t her exact words, of course, but what did she expect? Confinement will do that to a person. One ends up running (or in this case, swimming) in place. I don’t remember any of it. I was too busy plotting my escape.
One of my sons, Joah to be precise, swears that he remembers his birth. Frankly, so do I and so does his mom who struggled with the labor thing for hours and hours. I was there as an observer and an advisor. We had taken those Lamaze classes. My job was, roughly speaking, to remind her to relax and all that. I did my job. To no avail. Joah was possessed with the notion of fighting his way out and was taking his own sweet time doing so. Ultimately the delivery doctor grabbed his head with those stainless steel crab claws they call forceps and tugged him into the real world. That’s the part Joah says he remembers. I’ll have to take his word for it. I never had my head pinched that way so I guess there wasn’t much for me to remember.
When it comes to early memories I guess mine kick in at the crawling stage. On Sundays much of the family had a habit of gathering at the home of my grandmother Thiele’s younger brother Carl and his wife Regina’s home in West Los Angeles. The grandparents were there along with me, my brother and sister and Carl and Regina’s two kids. I was the youngest. My grandmother Theresa and Regina seemed to spend all afternoon in the kitchen cooking up that day’s big meal with my mom lending what I later learned to be a minimal hand. That Margaret wasn’t skilled at the traditional homemaking skills apparently was quite a sore point with Theresa, who I take it was less than thrilled when introduced by my dad as the woman he intended to marry. Theresa was old school European. Nuts and bolts.
Regina stored all her canned goods - things like soup and Pet Milk and such - in the lower kitchen cabinets next to the sink. Why, I don’t know. I prowled her linoleum kitchen floor on all fours up to no good. I distinctly remember the white wooden cabinet doors with their stainless steel and Bakelite handles which I didn’t need to reach to pry them open. The hinges were not spring loaded so I could simply grab them at the bottom edge and wedge them free. Once open, the cans were at my disposal. I enjoyed scooping them out, knocking them on their sides and rolling them about the kitchen floor. I was busted again and again for my efforts, picked up and carried back into the living room. I suspect the other kids were told to keep an eye on me but probably had little interest. That I was a serial offender was likely their neglectful fault.
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