memoir

The Tender, Magical Age of Six . . .

/ Gerry Wilson / 13 Comments

When Santa can deliver a piano down the chimney. When it takes three little boys to walk you to your mother’s car after school: one to carry your books, one your art portfolio, and one . . . well, the cutest was just window dressing.

First grader

In our little town, there was no kindergarten, but I was reading and writing by the time I entered first grade. I was also talking. A lot. Miss Agnes Ray, who had taught my mother when she was in the first grade, got enough of me one day and spanked my hand with a ruler. In fairness I have to say she had warned me more than once. I still remember how my palm stung, but I remember even more how humiliated I felt. It wasn’t over then, either. My best friend told her mother, and her mother told mine, and the hole of trouble got deeper. I didn’t talk so much in class after that.

About that piano

I remember we went to Memphis to shop for pianos so Santa would know which one to bring. In the music store, I spotted a piano with a big red SOLD sign on it and our last name. You should have heard my parents talk their way out of that one, but it was similar to the way they explained the street-corner Santas. They were all Santa’s helpers, my dad said. Santa couldn’t be everywhere at once. That piano must have been delivered to Daddy’s store and hidden in the back part that was like a warehouse. How he (and whoever helped him) got it into the house on Christmas Eve without waking me up remains one of the great mysteries of my childhood. Bordering on miracle, that’s what it was. But then, you’d have to know my dad.

Plate-glass windows

Daddy hadn’t been in the parts business very long when I was six. I loved his store. It had two big plate-glass windows, a serious office-looking desk near the front, and against the wall, a bookkeeping desk where all the account files were kept, a file cabinet with a radio on top, and on the wall, a NAPA calendar featuring forties-type beauties (a little racy; I’m surprised my mother let him get away with that one), cold concrete floors, a big heater, a long counter for serving customers, and behind that counter rows of tall bins that held the automobile parts, hundreds of them. The store often smelled of motor oil or paint, but that didn’t bother me. I loved to play among the bins and pretend they were caves or secret passageways. There was something a little shivery about those dark tunnels, but I could always come out into the light, and Daddy (and often Mother, too) would be there.

Busy dad (note the receding hairline)

About the time I started school, my mother began “keeping the books” for the business. I spent many hours playing at that big desk by the window that looked out on the street. You wouldn’t think much happens in a little north Mississippi town with fewer than 2000 people, but you might be surprised. A lot of life moved past that window.

Going back

I went in that building a couple of years ago. It’s now an antique shop, the brick facade painted dark red. I didn’t want to go in, but my husband encouraged me to do it. “You never know what you might remember,” he said, and he was right. The place felt incredibly small. The bins were gone, of course, and the automobile smells, but the pressed tin ceiling was the same, and I would almost swear I smelled Daddy’s pipe tobacco and heard the ching of the cash register.

Here’s a bit of a poem, “Parts,” about that place and time:

The storefront faced west, the plate-glass window gilded

by the late sun’s angle, hiding what was inside:

The concrete floor stained black with motor oil that poured

like syrup in winter. Smells of paint, metal, rubber, tobacco.

The slide and ding of the cash register.

The tall bins rose, ominous and unsteady, toward the ceiling,

the aisles between them tunnels, their shelves heavy with parts:

spark plugs, carburetors, batteries, fan belts. I knew them all.

In this memory, the windows are spattered

with canned snow, Merry Christmas painted on backwards.

We are there together, my father, my mother, and I.

Through the plastic mist we watch the Christmas parade pass,

the band’s music thin and distant as the shabby Santa who lifts

his slow-motion mittened hand in our direction.

What places are most significant in your early memories? Have you had the opportunity to go back?

This post is part of the October Memoir and Backstory Blog Challenge launched by Jane Ann McLachlan. For previous posts, see Recent Posts in the right column.

Age Three: Some Life Lessons

/ Gerry Wilson / 13 Comments

A dress my mother made for me

When I was three years old, my paternal grandmother died just days before Christmas, almost a year to the day after her husband had died. What awful Christmases those must have been for my dad, but I never knew it. As I said earlier, I have no memory of my dad’s father. I don’t remember his mother, either, but I remember the wake. I remember being carried into that little house that felt close and hot (it was late December, after all) and seeing a big box placed against the back wall of the living room. The room was dimly lit, but there was no avoiding that box. My grandmother was inside it. I remember wondering why she was sleeping there. I didn’t associate her stillness with “dead.” I had never seen anything lifeless. I didn’t know what dead was.

I filed that image away in memory. Many years later, thinking maybe I had dreamed it, I finally asked my mother if she and Daddy had really taken me to the house after my grandmother died.

She looked at me sort of funny. “We did,” she said. “Why?”

“Well, I remember it.”

She shook her head. “That’s not possible. You were too little.”

“But I do.” I described the room and where the casket was placed against the wall and how it seemed like I was looking down at my grandmother.

“It’s because your daddy was holding you,” Mother said, looking stunned. “That would explain why you were looking down.” I don’t remember whether Mother asked me if I was afraid. I was later, with other deaths, but I did not see another dead person until I was ten years old.

“There was a little girl who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead . . .”

An only child, by the time I was three, I was used to playing quietly by myself. I was a girly-baby doll kind of little girl. I had already begun to collect storybook dolls. Each time my dad went to Memphis on business, he brought me a “surprise”–sometimes a little doll (Bo Peep, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood . . .), sometimes something very special, like the rabbit fur hat and muff that made me sneeze. I loved pretty dresses. My mother was pretty, and I wanted to be pretty, too. (She did her part, rolling my hair in pin curls to try and tame it.)

I loved playing dress-up. I could make a playhouse out of anything–under the table, outside under the willow tree or even under a shrub!

Early morning dress-up time

About this time, the first thing I did every morning was put on a pair of my mother’s slingback heels and a hat and stash a big purse under my arm and head out to the garden. Never mind that I was still in my nightgown or that my hair was in pincurls. Nothing stopped me!

Meanwhile, in the house, there was sickness. But that’s a story for another day.

Maybe I was already learning to escape.

I still have some of those dolls, by the way. What childhood mementos do you have? What brings the memories back?

Starting Tomorrow: October Challenges!

/ Gerry Wilson / Leave a comment

Bring ’em on—the October challenges, that is! Starting tomorrow, I’ll participate in two writing challenges of different sorts.

 

The Submit-O-Rama is the brainchild of Khara House, poet/blogger extraordinaire at Our Lost Jungle. Khara has offered several levels of commitment so we can submit our work during October at a rate we’re comfortable with. I’m going with the one I think I’m most likely to do–the Submit-O-Rama Choice Challenge–wherein I make my own rules. And my rules will be to submit one story a week over the next month–not the same story each time!

 

 

My parents, before I was born.

 

 

The other challenge I’m subscribing to of my own free will is the October Memoir and Backstory Blog Challenge hosted by Jane Ann McLachlan at Join the Conversation. You’ll learn more about this one and my motivation for participating when you read the first memory blog post tomorrow: a memory before the age of two! Jane Ann has encouraged us to be creative, so we’ll see how it goes.

 

 

Both of these challenges are great practices for the writing life!

Visit Khara and/or Jane Ann and join in the fun. It’s not too late! And please do come back here tomorrow to see where the memory lane leads me first!