Earliest Childhood Memory 

As a young professor, when I first taught studio art, one of the printmaking portfolios I assigned was titled “Earliest Childhood Memory.” Students chose moms, dads, siblings, birthday cakes, teddy bears, tricycles, and family camping trips as subjects. Other portfolios included a fire and a tornado. Takane, a student from Kyoto, Japan, created a delightful linocut relief in which her hand grasped a pair of chopsticks, which in turn clutched a fish, her lunch, just before her cat snatched it from her.

My earliest memory remains vivid and frightening. When Mom and Dad were starting out and Dad drove a delivery truck for City Cleaners, they rented a sad, tiny cottage just down the highway from Gambier, Ohio. I don’t remember the interior of the house, but I was later told that the base of the home was rotted, which allowed unannounced visits from various small creatures. Grandpa and Grandma toiled over a ramshackle farm just a few miles away, and though Grandma worked in the kitchen at Peirce Hall for many years cooking for privileged east coast students, we were all an ocean away from the social machinery of Kenyon College. I was two years old. There were several kids who lived next door in the red house with the flat roof. All were older than me, between five and nine, and they were shouting, chasing me around the yard. My face and belly were sticky with something sweet. Barefoot and dressed only in my underwear, I ran and laughed blissfully with a kitchen knife in my hand through the grass, slippery with dew. Mom was nowhere around.

For a short while after college, I was a caseworker for the county Child Protective Services. One beautiful spring day (I thought, how could I discover anything heartbreaking on a day like this?) the office responded to a call from an aunt, and I was sent to check on the welfare of her nephew. My little hatchback barely negotiated the mud of a deeply rutted driveway. Towering thistle and a wide variety of other unchecked weeds dominated the place, and there was little distinction between yard and barnyard. Sharp, rusted farm implements like steel obstacles from the beaches of Normandy lay about ready for use, but likely hadn’t been operated for some time. A trailer, their home, sat listing somewhat. Orange rust stains ringed the roof and green mold painted the remainder. Tires, lumber, and other unidentifiable items were stuffed beneath the home, and hundreds of beer and soda cans, more than I’ve seen in one place except a recycling center, accumulated beneath a rickety dry-rotted porch.

The mom and dad sat at their kitchen table smoking and drinking coffee when I entered. They were polite folks and seemed unsurprised and unconcerned with my arrival. The walls of the kitchen were greasy from fried food spatter and yellow from cigarette smoke. Enormous black flies buzzed lazily about several encrusted and curled fly strips dangling from the ceiling. I provided my usual caseworker bit and asked if I might look around. The dad said nothing and though the mom offered me a cup of coffee and consented, she made no effort to guide a tour. The entire length of the hallway to the remainder of the trailer was filled two feet deep in clothes. I was obliged to walk unsteadily upon their wardrobe and duck in places. When I opened the bathroom door, I was astonished to discover that the back wall of the shower wasn’t there. The room was completely open to the elements and provided an unobstructed view of the barn and distant pastures.

Outside, I found the boy, about four or five, running around the yard in his underwear. Here was a familiar image. He could have been an impish cupid or a little buddha. He was barefoot and his legs were smeared with mud. And he was happy. Exceptionally happy. He offered that type of smile in children where you are sure he would burst out laughing at any moment and for any small reason. It was a smile that said he was loved despite his parents’ inadequacies. Thirty-five years later, I wonder what memories this boy reminisces from his childhood.

 

Catechism 

We were Catholic simply because Dad grew up Catholic and remained so because President Kennedy was Catholic. We rarely missed Sunday Mass at Saint Vincent de Paul, the limestone Neo-Romanesque church surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence on High Street. I was baptized at the marble font near the altar. I blundered through my first confession and cranky Old Priest made me repeat it, but I survived First Communion, catechism, and Confirmation, though I don’t remember learning much about compassion. I played a trumpet solo, “O Come All Ye Faithful,” for a midnight service, but I messed up and the choir members wouldn’t talk to me or ask for another solo after that. I learned to love Bach before I knew who Bach was when the organist played the “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” during recessionals. I was an altar boy for a couple of weeks for 7:00 am weekday services. Old Priest always added a single drop of water into the sacramental wine. Young Priest tipped one drop of wine into the water. 

When my mind wandered during Old Priest’s tedious homilies (He liked to spell his sermons. For Mother’s Day it would begin: “M is for the many gifts mothers give us. O is for all the other things mothers bestow . . . .”), I gazed at the large stained glass windows between the arches – exquisite depictions of the life of Mother Mary in vivid red, blue, green and amber: Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, Assumption. I knew all the stations of the cross from small paintings in the aisles around the perimeter of the nave. Like a medieval peasant, my appreciation for the pictures made up for my lack of memory of prayers, liturgy, or the lives of saints. Mom was a little worried when, at five, I played priest in the basement with a cardboard box as my altar, an Oreo cookie as the communion host, and a cup of Kool-Aid for the wine. I was mildly religious (though never protestant) for a brief time at fourteen before becoming more preoccupied with the mysteries of girls. Mass each Sunday was what my family did. It was predictable and comfortable, familiar and unchanging from year to year, season to season. 

Mass was our Sunday routine before Mom’s hysterectomy. Before she was convinced that not all of the softball-sized mass was removed, that it was cancerous and not benign. Before her paranoia, always lurking at the periphery of our lives, rudely surfaced. Before the police brought her home for trespassing at the rectory. (After all, she surmised, she could use the washer and dryer there any time she wished because she belonged to the church and put an envelope in the offertory basket every Sunday even when money was tight.) Before she was arrested and committed to the state hospital for harassing Old Priest. Before languishing in the psych ward. Before the threats of Thorazine and electroshock. Before Dad brought her home and still she glued candy Lifesavers to strategic locations on a Playboy centerfold and mailed it to the Bishop of Columbus. Before we lost the house and the dry-cleaning business. Before her rage turned on our family. Before she began throwing coffee cups and jelly jars at Dad’s head. Before Dad removed his hunting rifles from the hall closet. Before Dad, then my little sister and I, moved out, leaving Mom too alone to search for sanity.

Around Christmas, just before all this, before Mom’s mania became our new routine, Mom, Dad, my little sister, and I went to Mass as usual in our Sunday best and took our usual spot in the pews, on the left, four rows back. At first, as always, we dutifully stood-sat-kneeled, stood-sat-kneeled. Mom was part of the decorating committee that hung large red ribbons and green garland boughs throughout the church each year. She was eager for us to see her work. She wanted to be part of and contribute to something rather than spend long, sad afternoons napping in a dark bedroom. Soon after Old Priest walked down the center aisle with the altar boys carrying the cross, gospels, and incense, Mom began crying quietly. We later learned that, the day before, the other ladies in the group unanimously rejected Mom’s decorating innovations, and after she went home, switched it all to what was originally planned. Old Priest sanctioned the reversal. No one told Mom. The Mass was well under way when Mom pushed past us in the pew – left through the side door into the sacristy where the vestments were kept. This room led directly to the altar. Dad followed and caught up with her just before she rushed Old Priest who now stood, arms uplifted in prayer, before the parishioners. My little sister and I stood frozen in the congregation, listening helplessly to our mother’s sobbing and cursing. The organ and a hymn muffled the worst of it. Dad somehow coaxed, wrestled, and half-carried Mom out of the building, and after a little while I led my sister by her hand to join them in the church yard.

Sundays were different after that. Certainly, I saw indications of the true nature of people in other boys and girls. Cruelty was present: the teasing, an occasional bloody nose or a sock in the stomach, the ostracization and tears – the usual and customary torment of a child navigating the playground or the neighborhood. I never quite comprehended the brutality of other children, but I accepted that it existed. However this was different. Priests and church ladies weren’t supposed to behave so callously. They weren’t meant to cause suffering. This was the beginning of the end of my naivety. Love was now rare and conditional. This was my catechism in compassion.

 

A Beautiful Drawing

It was a beautiful drawing, by the phone in the tiny foyer of the front door we never used, in the little red house on Wooster Road. At four years old, I could reach halfway up the wall and swing my whole arm across the blank white surface in sweeping arcs. I liked how the blue crayon glided across the paint without the constraints of coloring book lines – the tiresome cartoon characters created by someone else. My first fresco, I was a little Michelangelo. Or, more likely, a budding Jackson Pollock, free to actualize inner angst in expressionistic gestures. The blue was Midnight Blue, my favorite from the Crayola box – much more suited to my intent than Periwinkle, Cerulean, or Navy. 

When I was discovered, Mom swore, grabbed my arm, swung me around, yanked down my pants and spanked my bare bottom. I remembered her hand was wider than my backside. I remembered her rage more than the pain. I remembered the disorienting humiliation but not the finished drawing. I remembered the irrationality of it all. Why was she so surprised? She was in the next room taking one of her endless naps and anyway I knew she could read my mind even when she was asleep. And I was creating something magnificent for Dad, for our home, but most of all for her. Why was it perfectly fine, why did we all laugh, when she dropped a jar of applesauce and it splattered everywhere – the floor, the ceiling, the walls, and me – just like Jack the Dripper?

Thirty years later, my wife and I stood talking with her brother, Randy, in the parking lot of Lemmy’s Diner after breakfast. From there he had a long drive to Cincinnati, but we were reluctant to part and our conversation lingered. Our son, Andrew, at four, was already ensconced in the Ford with his crayons and a coloring book. I forgot what it was like waiting for adults, the uncertainty of reclaiming the center of attention. When I opened the door to strap him into his booster seat, I stopped, frozen, open-mouthed, wide-eyed. It was beautiful. Andrew had drawn all over the backseat, not just a small section, but the entire seat from edge to edge as if, like Pollock, he ran out of canvas. Midnight Blue against a soft gray. Gray like the feathers of a mourning dove. I imagined how exquisitely the crayon must have glided over the fabric. My son listened soberly and patiently as I explained the significance of automobile resale value and depreciation (not really). We were thinking of getting a Honda. I was sure to let him know it was a beautiful drawing though. My only regret was erasing his drawing with cleanser. It all came right off. Too easily. No harm done. (Now, another thirty years later, my wife’s recollection of my appreciation for Andrew’s drawing differs quite a bit.)

 

Dear Siblings 

Vincent and Theo van Gogh exchanged genius, love and madness in those letters between Paris and Arles. Theo was a good brother. Hanzel and Gretel were dear siblings, lost together in the forest, and escaping the prospect of becoming the witch’s dinner. For three years, Leopold Mozart carted his children, Wolfgang and Maria Anna, around Europe – Vienna, Paris, Ghent, Zurich. His wunderkinds performed in palaces for the amusement of aristocrats. Mozart and his sister were so close they created their own language, and as adults traded harmless innuendo and scatological humor in their correspondence. It is thought, when Mozart was eight, they wrote his first symphony together in London while their father recovered from an illness. Throughout his life, Maria Anna, as much a musical prodigy as her brother, was Wolfgang’s muse.

My grandmother, Louise, and her five sisters, Martha, Isabelle, Bessie, Mabel, and Stella, regularly gathered around her kitchen table to play Rook, Flinch, or Uno and gossip and laugh until someone wet themselves, then laugh some more. A few of the women picked raspberries, blackberries, or strawberries for jam or pie, and snapped beans on warm summer evenings. My aunts Jane and Evelyn gave each other home perms and worked side-by-side as cooks at Mount Vernon Middle School for nearly twenty years.

Aside from the occasional phone call and birthday card, my little sister, Angie, and I haven’t talked much over the last twenty years. After our father died, the bond that held us together on holidays, there wasn’t much reason for us to keep in touch. Some months after the funeral, when it was time to clear out Dad’s house, we divided up his possessions and that was that. We sent each other checks when our parents’ respective estates were settled. I sent her money when she lost her apartment and job during COVID. I was her big brother. My job was to look out for her. But she paid it all back, insisting upon it.

Sometime in her twenties, discharged from the Air Force and a college dropout, when she worked on the line at the Gorman-Rupp factory in Mansfield, I began hearing about some guy who was harassing and stalking her. I suggested she talk with Human Resources or the police, but she didn’t pursue either option. One evening, out of the blue, she called and raged through the phone about how I broke into her house and stole Dad’s rifles. At Dad’s death, I gladly let her keep the guns as I was not interested in firearms or hunting of any kind. Somewhere in the rant, she called President Obama a half-breed. I was startled at how the differences between us were now enormous. I nearly hung up, but somehow calmed her down and eventually asked, “Why would I do that?” The rationale gave her pause. Again, I suggested the police. 

Angie always seemed to be moving. Every so often a succinct notification of a new address would arrive: “New address. Moving to stay safe.” She rarely trusted me with her phone number. It was the same stalker, finding and following her again and again across the state of Ohio. In the few conversations we had, I never questioned the existence of the stalker. I never questioned her compulsion to flee. I’m not sure why. It just seemed pointless to challenge what was fixed in her mind, as if the construct was now, physiologically, a part of the very cells in her brain. 

Then I received a call from a hospital social worker. Angie had packed up her things and drove eighty miles to Cincinnati to find our cousin, Kevin. The stalker was after her again and immediate flight was necessary. Instead of taking her in, Kevin called the police as he had not seen nor heard from my sister in twenty years. Angie had frightened him. When she alluded to suicide, she was detained and admitted to a psych ward. The social worker said, “Paranoid Personality Disorder.” This made sense as our mother was diagnosed as Paranoid Schizophrenic. Angie was prescribed medication, got a little therapy, and was released. But there was no solving the problem of the stalker. In my sister’s mind, the ogre would pursue her anywhere. 

I never expected my sister and I would write a symphony together. Maybe we could meet for a nice lunch now and then. But what would we talk about? Could we at least reminisce? I would recall how when I found our cat, Tigger, dead near the irises, I picked him up and tossed him over the fence at the back of the yard where the wild mint grew. Dad was furious. Angie was heartbroken. I was thoughtless, but I recall being unconsolably angry at Tigger for dying on us. Or the time when, bored out of our minds in the summer, I locked Angie out of the house and, in frustration, she thrust her bare little foot through the glass storm door. I caught the biggest piece of glass, but Mom screamed at me as she carried Angie to the bathtub. The water was pink. But also, I would recall how I made Angie laugh when she had just dunked an Oreo cookie in her milk and taken a bite, spraying milk and cookie across the table. Or how I would make her laugh in keeping her from eating sweet pickles as I gave the gherkins voices: “No! No! Don’t eat me! Please don’t eat me!” Occasionally we would allude to Dad’s marginal competence as a parent; however, we would never compare our horror stories about living with Mom. We simply didn’t talk about her. I suppose denial and avoidance were our symphony and our secret language.

With the help of a family friend, Angie got on disability and landed at an assisted living facility. She seemed settled and reasonably content. She saw a therapist for a while. I was cautiously relieved. Just the other day I received a birthday card from her. She is moving again.