February 2012
6 posts
1976: Cherchez la Femme
Around this time I was a guinea pig for my aunt, who was an elementary school English teacher. My aunt is a wonderful, ambitious woman who, in the course of her life, has been a teacher, a lawyer and a writer; in her later years, she adopted a child from Kazakhstan. She wasn’t a teacher for very long, but one of her lasting projects from that period was me: she taught me to read, at age...
1975: The Big Ship
This is a blank year, one devoid of memory. I’ve gone through the few photographs from ‘75 (a very unchronicled year, maybe reflecting the chaos of a move and my parents becoming overwhelmed with work—-my dad, as a sandwich delivery driver; my mother, getting her bachelor’s degree) and nothing has rung out from them. Apparently I was in a daycare sometimes,...
1974: When I Get to the Border
My earliest memory is of an Easter egg hunt, held at my aunt and uncle’s house in Hamden, Connecticut. So, April 14, 1974. It’s odd to know exactly the point in time where one’s memory begins; it’s convenient for me that it was a holiday.
It’s the slightest, most evanescent of memories, and it’s a compromised one, as three photographs survive from that morning,...
January 2012
8 posts
1973: Look Over Your Shoulder
I have tried to be a good son to my parents, as I was an awful child. The surviving photographs of my toddlerhood are all lies—-I am beaming in them, apparently happy; I am a baby politician, forever glad-handing, forever smiling, my face fixed in glee upon the camera. I’m working an unseen constituency. But most of the time I was cross and inconsolable, and I wailed in my crib all...
1972: The Men Who Live in the White House
The collected evidence of my first year alive: a birth notice in a long-shuttered Connecticut newspaper; a birth certificate whose vital stats have been typed neatly into each line of the form, though with a rightward slant to the all-capital letters, suggesting that the clerk had rolled the paper into the typewriter at a slight angle; the faded or expired memories of my nine aunts and...
Personal Canon: 1972
“You see the Americans do not know the names of the long and tedious list of deities and rites as we know them. Shorthand is what they know so well. They know this process for they have synthesized the HooDoo of VooDoo. Its bleeblop essence; they’ve isolated the unknown factor which gives the loas their rise. Ragtime. Jazz. Blues. The new thang. That talk you drum from your lips. Your...
1971: Maria Bethânia
I will be forty years old quite soon, so I suppose it’s time for an assessment of sorts, of a life possibly half-lived, of one over three-quarters lived if I were to die at fifty, as my grandfather did.
So throughout 2012, I will try to recall something from each of the forty years that I’ve spent breathing and, allegedly, growing. When I reach the years of my adolescence and young...
