I don’t remember my childhood. At least, not in any contiguous pattern, a fluid arc of cause and effect, with beginnings and middles and ends. There is no cosmic projector whirring and spinning through dusty light, flashing a story line – neither love story nor horror film nor some tender coming of age film – on some interior screen, while I sit on a worn plush seat, a spring pushing against the small of my back and the butter from my popcorn making my fingers shiny with grease, while I watch, rapt.
There’s not even a vague disinterest as I view of my life as if it were someone else’s story I were viewing from some distant, disconnected height. There’s no boredom, or sadness or wistful hope. There are just huge patches of not much of anything – no dust bowl and tumbleweeds, no darkness and a keening, plaintive wind, none of those common tropes.
No trope, and no memories, although, if you ask my mother, she’d say I just remember the bad stuff. That may be truer, if truth can have a comparative, a greater than or lesser than finality. It’s not that I have no memories. It’s not that I only remember The Bad Stuff, cataloging all the pains and hurts and disappointments of childhood for later review and recrimination. There was love and joy and frustration and sad and wonder and love and pain, over and over and over again. It was all the warp and weft of our family.
But I don’t have those stretches, those seamless and flowing pictures of time and love. Or of pain. What I have, I realized, as I read Basya Schechter’s bittersweet essay for the Jewels of Elul, was that I get picture frames – brief flashes of color and light that surprise me and take me off guard in a disjointed array.
The frames of my father are mostly small. There’s the color of his coffee – a rich caramel that steamed against the unnatural whiteness of a Styrofoam cup. There’s a feathered headdress, worn in the days before political correctness, as he and my big brother who was all of seven or eight, but he was so much bigger than I, and older, and closer to my dad, who came home from the office, tired and spent, but who could muster up just enough energy and attention to do Indian Guides with my brother, and who promised we’d do Indian Princesses when I got older.
There’s the stats book for the Little League teams he managed, first for my older brother, who started young and in the outfield – right field, the home of lost players who hadn’t yet gotten the hang of the game and so were placed there, where they could do little harm – and who got better, year after year, all the way through the Pony Leagues. He coached my younger brother the year of the locusts, whose carapaces littered the ground and made walking noisy and slightly disgusting. I kept the stats every season, even the Year of the Locusts, so that I could sit next to my father on the bench, so that I could tag along into his world of sports and sons and attention. It wasn’t Indian Princesses, but it was a place near him and so I hoped that it would be enough.
There’s the frame that holds the picture of my brother, standing between my father’s legs, his hands clutching my father’s and a look of gleeful terror on his face as my father lowered him slowly. “Keep your arms stiff. I won’t drop you!” he would say to my brothers, who both couldn’t wait to play this heady and terrible game of Trust, as it was called in our family parlance. A simple game – how low could you go, how close to the floor could you go, with only our father there to hold you, keep you from falling and crashing to the floor. I would watch in envious and eager anticipation for my turn, so sure that this time, please this time, I would have the courage to play.
There is one frame, though, one small picture that is mine alone. Mine and my father’s. It is the picture of us, sitting together in shul, so close that I could feel the wool of his suit against my face and arm, sheltered by his nearness, carried gently by the drone of his voice as he prayed in a language that was at once familiar and strange, and the cadence of his chanting lulled me. He would hold me close, his arm wrapped around my shoulder and his tallit covering me. Sitting there, sheltered, I would play with the fringes of his tallit, wrap them around my fingers, stretch them until they lost their elasticity and shape. His hand would cover mine, to still my fidgeting, and it would linger there, tangled with the fringes, connecting us for just that moment.
These small picture frames of love and longing come, in flashes of light and heat. When I sit with my son, so close that our shoulders bump, and my arm laces through his – because he is too tall for me to wrap it around his shoulder now – and we pray together, in a language at once ancient and new, and my tallit shelters us both, my son takes the fringes and he stretches them and tangles them and wraps them in his fingers, these fringes of love.
I return, again and again, to that small picture frame, now large enough to hold us all, to shelter my memory with love and grace.
Stacey is a poet and essayist, living in the suburbs of Chicago with her son, Nate. Her blog is called Stumbling Towards Meaning, and can be found at www.staceyzrobinson.blogspot.com.
Written in response to Basya Schechter’s Jewel “Daddy’s Pockets.” Read it HERE.
4 Responses
First, I want to say, and I don’t mean to patronize, that I love Basya’s recordings as Pharaoh’s Daughter. Now then, I have no bitter memories of my childhood. My parents, and grandparents, are/were all immigrants to the USA – Holocaust refugees. They lived their lives as I guess all people do, simply by doing their best. I can’t recall any defining moment in my childhood that directed all of my subsequent personality development. My only real frustration during my youth was that I was not allowed to study German in public school as I had requested, the school assigned me instead to French class. I loathed French class. I couldn’t slip sufficiently far under my classroom desk to avoid being called on, in French. So kol hakavod to Basya Schechter and her career, and BTW, I too used to trounce around NY clad in a navy pea coat.
Not all demonstrations of love by a father have to be taken in a sexual nature. One of my fondest memories of my father was on a cold snowy afternoon in Pittsburgh. He had taken me to a concert. We were early, before the doors of the Syria Mosque opened. He opened his long overcoat and enveloped me inside to keep me warm. We saw “Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye”. I will always feel that love and warmth. He died when I was just 16. Maybe that is one reason I have good relationships with men!
“Daddy’s Pockets” brought me back to that same, very painful, moment. freshman year, I lived walking distance from my college, but in the same town as my family. The first time I ran into my dad, at a party, I rushed across the room, threw my arms around him, and exclaimed, “Daddy!” He stepped back, said “Save those kisses for your boyfriend,” followed by, “You’re too old to call me Daddy.” The same intense pain that Basya Schechter felt, and the beginning of years of distancing from that sweet childhood bond. Dad is 88 now, and still, when I see him, I say hello, sometimes give him a quick peck, but silently wish I could hug him the way I did all those many years ago.
Jan Robertson
I am so sorry that Batya and other women whose fathers were very blunt about saying they were too old for certain intimacies have suffered lifelong pain because of what seemed to be rejection. On the other hand, having known many women who were molested by their fathers (one’s father is in prison right now for this), I can also see that at some point the fathers who realized their little girls were growing up may have acted purely out of love for them by putting an end to things that were becoming inappropriate. Certainly they could have found a better way to express this and tried to link it to an acknowledgement and respect for their daughter’s approach to womanhood. Not being a man, I can only suspect that something like having a girl, even one’s own daughter, put a hand into a pocket, especially a pants pocket, might have provoked feelings that surprised and even horrified the father and prompted him to forbid it in future. As a woman, there came a time when I had to tell my baby sons not to put a hand into my blouse because they still wanted to suckle even when I had first weaned them, and later on, I had to discourage them from wanting to sleep in my bed with me when they were sick or frightened. Both my sons are still reasonably close to me, so I must have done it in a way that didn’t send a message of rejection, but still I imagine it was a bit hurtful at the moment for both of us. Such things have to be handled wisely, but they certainly have to be done. The alternative is much worse.