Selective Memory

Memory is a vast graveyard densely overgrown with weeds. It includes the multiplication tables, my father’s watery blue eyes, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that thing that popped into my mind yesterday and just as quickly clouded over and went into hiding. Sometimes I go foraging in the mossy cemetery of recollection. The Cuban Missile Crisis is there among the plots from 1962. It was October of my freshman year and I had barely unpacked my bags when Khrushchev decided to deploy ballistic missiles in Cuba. We were all terrified and frantically calling home from pay phones in the dining hall, reliving all the time we spent under our desks in third grade hiding from an imagined Hiroshima. It was a year before Nikita pulled his famous shoe-banging stunt at the U.N., but we were already afraid of him. We needed a villain and he was convenient. Fear was narrowly focused back then. Not pervasive like a bad smell, invisible like nerve gas the way it is now. It was the Russians. It was the bomb.

The nuclear threat was only one of our coming-of-age preoccupations. In high school, I had picketed Woolworth’s on 79th street because they wouldn’t serve Black customers at their lunch counters in the South. I had also been one of a small group of refuseniks who wouldn’t repeat the Pledge of Allegiance. It was the “under God” part that got me. I didn’t have an opinion about God one way or the other at the time, but I didn’t want him forced on me like someone my Aunt Ella was trying to fix me up with. I don’t remember anyone telling me why I needed to take a stand against the Pledge, but I felt intuitively that no one should be telling me what to say. If you had asked me what I believed, I would have drawn a blank, but some words just didn’t taste right in my mouth. Like when we were made to recite the Lord’s Prayer in assembly at PS9. Even as a small child out from under the desk, I knew it was wrong. I craved a moral universe that was neatly divided between fair and foul, but there was always a lingering doubt, a bathtub ring. In 1962, I didn’t know where Vietnam was. But by the time Kennedy was assassinated a year later, I had found it on the map and I was pretty sure the real story was not unfolding on the family Zenith. I did not come from a red diaper family, but I knew what was what and I knew that six times seven was forty-two. You don’t forget these things.

Photo by Nicola Tolin on Unsplash

My father, he of the watery blue eyes, was a Stevenson Democrat who believed in the system in a way that I would soon be unable to do. Many people were comfortable in that belief when I was a child and in my neighborhood, they were all Democrats. There was a guy in the extended family who was a Republican, but everyone kept their distance from him. My father wanted me to know the basics, so he would quiz me at the dinner table on my ability to recite the Gettysburg Address, the Declaration of Independence, and the Preamble to the Constitution. The literature of American exceptionalism came with the half a grapefruit before the lamb chop. He was a first generation American whose parents came over from Budapest and thrived in the dry goods business. Their store was on the ground floor of the tenement they owned on First Avenue where my grandparents raised their eleven children.

There’s a fairy tale quality to these stories now, a cringe-worthy mawkishness. The memory of the immigrant experience, of being digested into the belly of America, is long past for white people, lolling around in the middle class. My own story doesn’t extend back that far and is in many ways flatter and narrower than my father’s. There always seems to be a tug-of-war between cynicism and sentimentality when I think back on where I come from, who I’ve been, and how I fit into the national melodrama. I wish I didn’t fall into the “simpler times” trap, but I find it insidious. I know the Black woman who came down from Harlem to vacuum our carpets came in through the back door. I know that I was treated like merchandise on the street, in the office. But I can almost feel myself holding those memories at bay to make room for daddy. I’m nostalgic for an innocence that was never really mine.

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.