Chapter Three - Awareness

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.