Blue Lightbulb #1

What's your earliest memory?

The death a while back of someone I’d never met affected me more than the passing of folks close to me, although there really haven’t been many recently. Perhaps it’s because he was six or seven years younger than me that our two degrees of separation has me contemplating mortality and what Arnold Siegel called “being gewman” decades ago (hint: say it out loud while pretending to have a New York accent). Obviously, it’s time to start my memoir!

Do you remember being born? Research seems to indicate that it’s impossible because the ability to verbalize experience doesn’t occur until 24 to 36 months. Language and a sense of self in memory-making are essential to explicit, or episodic, memory. The first memory I can place at a specific time is talking on the phone with my mother when she was in the hospital delivering my brother who’s three years younger than me. I believe the memory of sleeping alone in a bedroom lit by a single blue lightbulb predated this incident, though I can’t be sure. And of what significance is that memory seven decades later?

For no one’s edification but my own I plan to chronicle my life from the blue room until now, augmented with photographs where possible.

Sitting on Uncle Gogo’s lap, steering his new ‘56 Bel Air down the dirt road to the family homestead in Cherryfield, Maine. I was four, maybe five years old.

Driving to the Orlando airport early last Saturday I heard an hour-long broadcast on NPR deconstructing the David Byrne song “How Did I Get Here?” Along with scolding reminders that white men like the Scottish-born Talking Heads founder had stolen rock ‘n’ roll from Africans were poignant stories by people reminiscing about the first time they heard the song and what it meant to them. Other than finding the band mildly annoying the song had never provoked much thought on the matter but it hit me that dark morning, following the circuitous back road route Apple Maps had chosen for me to catch my flight to Boston: what brought me to this exact moment, seven decades after the blue-lit room left such an indelible memory in my skull?

I’m going to set these memories – which exist with greater detail than yesterday’s breakfast – in chronological order to see what I can make of them. I’ll type, post, then type some more, with no set schedule.

The absence of my younger brother Paul from my earliest memories puts my age at no more than three at its earliest point. I grew up at 32 Bigelow Street in the Oak Square, Brighton neighborhood of Boston, a half hour streetcar ride to the mouth of the oldest subway in the country, then to Park Street Station at the Boston Common without changing cars. My parents didn’t drive so we took streetcars, subway trains, buses and taxis for the first sixteen and a half years of my life. They also didn’t watch sports so I had no idea such activity existed until much later. These two depravations had polar opposite repercussions throughout my life right up until this morning and will probably do so again tomorrow.

My mother called the house a Philadelphia Duplex which meant two street addresses, one for our first floor unit with two of its four bedrooms on the second floor, sharing walls with the main floor of the other address around the corner at 7 Justin Road, with its additional bedrooms on the third floor. I’ve yet to find historical reference to an architectural style by that name or any other examples of it but that’s how family mythology passes from one generation to the next. Who knows, it might even be true!

Built in 1910 the house had gas sconces in many rooms that had been converted to electricity by the time we lived there in the fifties. What hadn’t changed were the two coal-fired furnaces in the basement, one for each unit. Every season we’d have coal delivered by a truck specially equipped with a coal chute that would back across our lawn to the cellar window in the granite foundation and dump its clattering load, which I loved watching from the bay window above. My dad and I would walk down Champney Street to Frank’s corner store for kindling and haul it up the hill. After setting fire to some newspaper we’d use the soft wood to build a healthy blaze before starting the strenuous, never ending process of carrying shovels full of coke to feed the monster. Coke produced more heat than coal but was more expensive. You never wanted the fire to go out because you’d have to start the process all over again. Every once in a while you’d go to the cellar and shake down the ashes.

We paid $90 a month in pre-rent control days for a unit that Zillow now values at $1.4 million dollars, so the combined value of the house is close to $3 million. Zillow has its shortcomings but where else can one find a photo of one’s childhood bedroom, with or without blue lighting?

Top right is my blue bedroom. Of interest is the different room-use patterns popular among modern sophisticates compared to my time at the house. The bottom right photos show what had been a formal dining room, the first looking toward the front bay windows and the second looking back toward the kitchen. When I was a kid a walk-through pantry separated the dining room and kitchen, accessed through a swinging door. The dining table is now in the kitchen which has been opened up by eliminating two more pantries. The only untouched element is the built-in china cabinet.

Next time: the first girl I saw naked. At age three.