So, sans karma, my earliest memories start in my fourth year. And even some of those memories are probably the result of stories others have told me of my life as a child. Family snapshots also probably embellish original memory bytes. Filtering this exotic input from native bytes implanted by experience is impossible, after sixty plus years of co-mingling them. Possibly hypnotism or therapy – psycho or drug – could expose the difference and tease more total legitimate memories from areas of my database normally hidden from consciousness, even memories from former lives. But such induced memories are always suspect. What follows is therefore necessarily a blend of legitimate and artificial memories that have been with me so long they amount to the same thing.

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One of my very earliest memories is running across the route 41 highway bridge over the Susquehanna with my grandmother Bowden in hot pursuit. We were pretty evenly matched, speedwise, with my short legs and her crippled and chronically painful feet (unset foot bones broken during a childhood tree-climbing accident). I don’t remember why I wanted to get away, or how the conflict resolved, but she must have eventually caught me and returned me home by force or persuasion.

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Home at the time was a rented house not far from one end of the bridge in Havre de Grace (pronounced haverdeegrass by natives), Maryland.

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I don’t remember why my grandmother was in charge at the time. She sometimes came over from Johnstown, PA, to fill in when my mother took a few days to visit her mother near Pittsburgh, or to help out when her younger sister had a baby or some such relative duty.

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Several other vague memories linger from the Havre de Grace days. My older brother, about 11, had started to read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan books, and identified with the namesake, climbing trees and yodeling in what he assumed was an uninhibitedly manly, Tarzanish manner. I can see him in the large tree in front of a neighbor’s house shirtless and putting on a king-of-the-jungle show for some girls, including my sister, who would have been about eight.

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The neighbors across the street were the Sentmans. Their girl, Elizabeth, was about my age, and a dominant type – “bossy” was the contemporary term. I have a summer play picture of her driving a toy pedal car while I rode on the hood. In the winter, our relationship was less happy. When I wasn’t into some activity she had in mind, she repeatedly pushed me down in the snow until I ran home to my mother in tears.

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We lived in Havre de Grace only a couple years. My brother and sister went to school there while I was home with my mother. She tells how when I was not quite four she would send me down to the little neighborhood grocery store a block away with a dime and instructions to buy a loaf of bread. Middle class residential neighborhoods were generally safe in the early 40s; no one worried about kidnappers or perverts.

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Schools and neighborhoods were segregated. My mother’s black helper – all middle class white wives had them – Aggie, lived in the colored section of town. I remember her dimly, a nice person, who sometimes looked after me.

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What I remember more vividly about Aggie was that her husband or whoever brought her to our house drove a ‘41 Chevrolet, the deluxe model, and four door, whereas our ’41 Chevrolet was only the standard model and 2 door. My father had bought it new for something under $600, cash; people didn’t finance cars in those days. He thought a 2-door was safer; children couldn’t fall out the back doors.

 

 

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In the summer of 1943, we moved to Harrington, Delaware for a few months. It was more rural. Again, we lived in a rented house, in the back yard of which was a traditional privy, which I frequently used, a private getaway as much as anything. There were bees, wasps, spiders and other bugs, but they didn’t bother me, particularly. Just behind the privy over the fence was the ‘colored school.’ Sounds from it, especially during recess, were quite lively.

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Memories from Delaware are more solidly imprinted. I remember, for example, my mother enrolling me in vacation Bible school at some nearby church. I was basically shy, and being thrown in with a possibly rowdy bunch of kids I didn’t know was terrifying. The first day of class, I told the teacher I thought I would just hang around outside. They must have coaxed me in, though I recall nothing of the learning or social experience.

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I remember too – it must have been soon after we moved to Harrington – asking my brother to walk around the block with me so we could check out the neighborhood. He found a short piece of 2x4, threw it down in the dirt road, and walked around it. “There,” he said. “There’s a block. You can walk around it all you want.” I suppose that’s what big brothers are for: to expose one to examples of higher logic and semantics.

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More automotive memories begin to accumulate in Delaware. The family sometimes took Sunday afternoon rides out on mostly dirt roads through the flat, sandy, woods and fields around Harrington. We had a mutt, Skippy, that my brother had found somewhere and brought home. Skippy typically rode with his head out the window and one time fell out, after becoming excited by a squirrel or other wildlife that needed chasing. He must have been riding in front, in my mother’s lap, because the Chevy’s rear windows only rolled about half way down (which always intrigued me), and Skippy could not have fit through. In any case, we stopped and retrieved him, unhurt. I always rode in the back, standing up behind the fold-forward front seats, hardly the safest arrangement for anybody, but nobody thought about that in 1943. Seat belts and car seats for children were unknown.

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