I wonder what it
is like to see, and hear, and be aware that stuff is going on around you, but
you have no words, no language to anchor down these sensations flooding into
your brain. It happens to animals all the time. I am sure I believe
that my dog Tucker understands language.
I can say, “Are you sure
you want to come in before you take a pee?”
Tucker will look at me, his
ears go back, his eyebrows rise, he pauses, and then turns around and walks out
into the yard, takes his pee stance, and there is the sound of his release.
Tucker doesn’t talk with words, but his face can be expressive. But
Tucker seems to have some awareness that some combinations of words, or some
keywords, are asking him to have a response.
I imagine that
undomesticated animals, like a sparrow, tap and stretch and push on the shell
of their egg and crack their egg. The little chick feels that tiny flow
of cold air and the drive to get out grows.
Once the egg is opened
enough the little bird rests exhausted but she feels hunger. A shadow
suddenly covers the nest and there is a huge bird, mama, with a plump grub in
its beak, and the chick raises its head and its own tiny but surprisingly
wide mouth opened and receives its dinner, properly called grub.
But the chick has no
language. What goes on in the mind when they feel the air, but
have no word for air? It sees the shadow cover the nest as
the mother lands on the nest and it’s wide wings block the sun, but the chick
has no words for big bird [awe that’s a cute accident] no word for hunger,
no word for grub?
That was what was going on
with me as I moved from unaware baby, crying over sensations, to a toddler.
People talk to babies all the time. Sometimes the big people talk
in a stupid manner, the way often referred to as baby talk: “How's my little
smooch woochy? I could just eat you up -- uh boo, boo, boo, boo, poo.”
Despite the goochy-goochy
stuff, there are consistent words said to a baby and connections start to
happen. Mama, Dada, and best of all, the child’s name. That
happens to babies. Very soon a parent can say the child’s name and even
very young babies will turn and look toward the sound of that voice.
Still, mostly the baby transitioning to toddler is aware, but has few
words to connect to all they are becoming aware of, and making sense happens
slowly.
When I saw The Miracle
Worker on TV, the one starring Patty Duke, I remember wondering what was going
on in Helen Keller’s mind all those years when she had no words to make sense
of herself and the world around her. It was clear that even without words
Helen would smell food, touch food, eat food, and she knew what she was doing.
Those action/sensations were familiar to her but without words she had to
have some way for her brain to distinguish between touch, smell, the sensations
of heat and cold. This is not a guess, this is known. Helen Keller
wrote a book and describes some of the things that happened to her before she
had any words to attach to those events. Even without words, the brain
figures out a way to make sense out of being aware of the world around us, and
of our own selves.
I don’t remember going
through that transition but I know that I did. Being unaware, and then
becoming aware is interesting and I would like to know what that is like.
So it is frustrating to me to know that it happened to me, that I went
through that very interesting time, and I remember doodly-squat about it.
Once I started having words
to attach to everything, I also started storing some things that happened.
Memory.
But I haven’t remembered
everything. Memory is like lugging around this big burlap bag full of
grains of memory, and each grain is about the size of a grain of rice, and the
bag holding your memory has a little hole in it. As we traveled
through our lives little grains of memory drop out and are left behind.
From time to time you might check the bag, check the rice, pour it out on
a table and examine it, and maybe you notice some grains are missing.
Maybe you don’t notice until someone asks you to weigh the bag, but
memories are forgotten, but what do you do? Once a memory is gone, really
gone and not misplaced, well, it is gone forever. That hole in your bag
of recall is hastily repaired, repacked, and more rice grains are added as you
journey on, but the repairs are poor done and the hole opens up and we just
keep on forgetting stuff. Towards the end of life the hole in your memory
bag has an even larger hole in it. For some of us it is a damn tear we
call dementia, and dementia becomes a rapid loss of memory for the remainder of
your life, and sometimes your bag of memory is unfairly light, and
unfortunately way too empty.
I wonder what my earliest
memories are, and can I actually put those memories in some sort of
chronological order? I remember being in the backyard of my grandmother’s
house. She took this tiny, wispy twig off a tree, put the twig between my
legs and swished them back and forth. I remember feeling stings. I
was being punished for some baby crime. Or was this a story my father
told about something that happened to him, and as I search tirelessly for my
history, I somehow took up this story about something that happened to daddy,
and it became something that happened to me. If it happened to me, it had
to have happened before the time we lived in Bishop, Texas, because I had a lot
of memories from the time we lived in Bishop. I was 3 and almost 4 years
old when we lived in the small town of Bishop. That would mean I had a memory
when I was 3 years old. That seems unlikely to me, but if you ask me now,
right now, at this moment, when I am 66 years old and looking way back, I would
tell you that it seems like something I remember happening to me. Would I
bet my life on it? Hell no, I wouldn’t bet a nickel on it. Still
that seems like a memory of something that really happened to me.
I believe, when we are very
young children, our bag of memories is light, and it may be easier for a young
child to remember further back that adults. For example, when we adopted
Ryan, at three weeks of age, we took him the first morning of his life with us,
on a trip to Walmart to stock up on baby stuff. It was winter, so we were
concerned with the cold and so Ryan was wrapped up and even his face was
lightly covered with this blanket. As wheeled around Walmart buying all
the stuff needed for a baby [we got one day’s warning that Ryan was coming to
us, and had nothing when placement was made. I remember putting the
blanket over Ryan’s face because I realized he was looking up towards the
ceiling, and the harsh fluorescent lights were in his eyes. But after a
few moments I just had to look Ryan’s beautiful face, and I pulled the blanked
back. Then I covered his face again. Blanket covered, blanket
uncovered, covered, uncovered.
Now I’ve forgotten exactly
when it was, but it seems like Ryan was around two years old when we took him
to that same Walmart. While we were there Ryan looked up and said that he
remembered looking up at that ceiling and that it would get dark and then light
and dark and then light.
Did Ryan really remember
something that happened to him at three weeks of age?
I’m a proud father, so, for
me, he did, he actually remembered something that happened to him at three
weeks of age. When I told teenager Ryan this story about himself, and
asked him as a if he remembered telling me about the lights and the blanket, he
said no. The tiny hole in his bag of memories was fuller, and the weight
of the new memories press down on the older memories and more of those oldest
memories are forced way down, and many of them fall away.
I believe my first clear
memory was waking up from a nap. I remember I was looking through my eyelids.
My eyes were shut tightly, and what I was seeing were colors. Red
was the biggest part of the color, but there was yellow and green, and even a
little blue. I remember thinking that what I was seeing was polio.
I remember thinking, “This is what polio looks like.”
I remember feeling too hot.
It was sea coast Texas hot and I could feel the sheets on my bed and they
were damp from my sweat. I opened my eyes and looked around. I was
in my small big boy bed. The room was a light mint green, and there were
things around me. I had blocks on my bed. I remembered that my
mother told me I had to take a nap during the hottest part of the day, or I
might catch polio. It was clear from the way she said it that catching
polio was bad, but I had no clue what polio really was. The nap part made
me think it was like a lion or something that only came out in the hot part of
the day, and that was why I couldn’t stay outside to play.
“Mama,” I asked, “is polio something big with teeth?”
“No, no,” she said. “Polio is a germ.”
“What’s a germ?”
“Germs make you sick, but they are so tiny they can’t be seen.
If a germ gets inside you, it can make you very, very sick.”
I remember thinking, if you
can’t see it, how do you know it is there? Of course we can’t see God and He’s
there, right? I thought maybe a germ was more like the devil and it was
moving around the streets during the hot part of the day and when they saw
little kids playing they would go over and get inside the kid. I was
afraid. I didn’t want that devil polio getting in me.
“How does the polio get
inside?” I asked my mother.
My mother paused to
consider this, to select the right words for a 3-year-old, and then she said,
“We are not sure. Maybe it floats in the air and goes up your nose.
Maybe it lands on your fingers and if you rub your eyes the germ gets
inside you through your eyes, or if you put something in your mouth it get
inside through your mouth. Some germs get inside you through a bo-bo
[or word for a nick or scrape]. Maybe it gets inside through your ears.
We are not really sure how, but we know it happens and sometimes it is
very bad, you can get really sick. That’s why you have to take a nap
every day.”
Looking back, I can see
this scary story was, at least in part, self-serving. Naps give mothers a
break. Later, when my twin brothers were born, I had my own experiences
with baby/toddler care, and I knew how exhausting that responsibility can be,
and I too would lie with impunity to a child if it could get me a little
respite. I may have inflicted psychological wounds that bothered those
two boys the rest of their lives and at the time that seemed worth it just to
get them to lay down and give me a break. Maybe my lies were not
inflicted with impunity. I feel some guilty about that now.
I’m not sure if my mother’s
explanation was good or bad, this pep talk about the dangers of polio, but as
an old guy, looking back, I have some doubts that the hot part of the day made
one more susceptible to catching polio. I think people caught polio from each
other. I can remember that when polio cases started to pop up in your
town that they city closed the public pools, and people were leery about being
in movie theaters and even attending church. The connection between
polio and naps may have been one of those “old wives’ tales” and my mother was
given to accepting and repeating “old wives’ tales” even when she was a young
wife. I don’t begrudge her trying to coax me to be in my room, lying
down, and not play, but the fear factor is something else. I must add
that this was before my family had a TV, and had we owned a TV I am not sure
there was that much children’s programing, so mothers couldn’t plop a kid down
in front of Beanie-Einstein-square-pants and turn them little booger into a
toddler zombie, so there were just not that many respite arrows in a mother’s
quiver.
Knowing now, how
significantly fears have impacted my life, perhaps the fear-germ got into me,
way back then, in Bishop, Texas, when I was 3 years old, and like polio I was
infected, and fear and I have limped through life together.
I am sure I have lots of
memories from our time in Bishop, Texas, and I don’t think our time there was
long, still, in my museum of memories, in the first room, visitors will first
see the things that occurred while me and my parents were living in Bishop.
I remember there was a Chinaberry Tree in the front yard, and it
was a small tree. I remember being told that the berries on the
Chinaberry Tree were poison, and if I ate even one of them that I would get
sick, my tummy would hurt, and then I would die. That’s another dash of
fear.
I remember my daddy making
me a bow and arrow out of branches of the Chinaberry Tree. I could see
him making notches in the branch [it was more like a twig], notches on both
ends, and taking a string to tie a string on the twig, bowing the twig out a
little, and tying the string to the opposite end. Then my daddy took
another twig and cut another notch. He demonstrated, by putting the stick
against the string, pulling the string and stick back, causing the bow to,
well, bow out, and then he let it go and the stick flew two feet in the air and
dropped to the floor.
I picked the bow up, and
saw that it was good. I tried to do what my daddy did, but the stick
arrow would not stay up. It took both hands and three tries before I got
the arrow to fly forward.
The me now, 66 years old at
the moment of this writing, is wondering if a bow and arrow, even a tiny one
made from twigs, was a good toy for a 4 year old. This was something that
should have been feared, and yet my 20 year old mother and 22 year old father
did not seem to think there was anything dangerous about playing with a bow and
arrow made from thin sticks cut from a Chinaberry Tree.
I remember we had a cat and
while I played with and held the cat, my mother tells me the cat didn’t like
me. My mom said that when I was playing in the grass the cat would come
up behind me, stop, wiggle as he planned his next move, and then he would
suddenly shoot out at me, jump on my back, push me over, and in a flash the cat
was totally gone, disappeared like part of a magic act.
One of my oddest memories
from my ¾ year old mind happened when I woke up in the night. I was in my
room, but it was not totally dark. Being summer, it may have stayed light
as late as 9 PM, and so maybe i’d just been asleep a couple of hours, but I was
awake, or awakened by something. I heard voices. I hear laughing.
The voices were coming from my parents’ bedroom.
I got out of bed and walked toward the sound. The house was
full of shadows but there was light streaming out of the open door of my
parent’s bedroom. I walked until I stood inside the light and I could
look into their room. My parents were both sitting on the side of the
bed. They were naked. I don’t remember knowing the word naked then,
but I knew their clothes were missing. My father was sitting to my left,
my mother to my right.
“What are you doing up?” asked my father.
“Go on back to bed,” my mother said.
“Wat’juh doin’ “ I asked.
“We’re playing,” my father said. To prove it he reached over
and sort of play slapped at my mother’s chest. What I saw were breasts,
but at the time it was just odd to me. My mother responded by reaching
over and play slapping at my father’s chest. I thought it odd that their
chests were different.
“No back to bed, right now,” barked my father suddenly no longer
playful, but mad. I did. Maybe I had been punished before, but I
don’t remember that. All I remember from that moment was that when my
daddy was mad I was better off not being near him.
I went to bed.
