The end of childhood

The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.

William Faulkner

Memories of the past are a strange thing for siblings because they can recall things from their days growing up together that one or the other can’t possibly remember about the same event, or even that it occurred. My brother and I are good examples of this. We don’t at all have the same conception of the importance of memories. Nostalgia is a word he emphatically doesn’t like. I love the word and revel in calling up memories and associations of good times in the past, or for decades such as the Fifties and Sixties. I like oldies music, fads, and retro collectible items, whether old or reproductions. For me, the past is indeed not even past because it contains everything I was at the time. So why not linger there as much as I want? I also try to recall and confront past disastrous decisions, failures, and mistakes and the reasons for those. It’s not that this gives me new insights into my past, but it makes me aware of just how much I’ve overcome, what I’ve succeeded at, and how lucky I am to be where I am today. This helps me understand my past friendships, and the ways I’ve interacted with people over the decades, whether successfully or not. It’s all part of life, the past and the present. But as I’ve gotten older, the future is something I’ve thought about less and less.

The opposite is true for my brother. He believes the past is past, move on, get over it, don’t dwell on it, or even think about it. What’s the point? By contrast, I keep harking back to the past, culling and dissecting memories in a never-ending quest to figure out why I am who I am, and how I came to be what I am today, for better or worse. The negative and positive aspects of my life all have a say. My memories are myself. That’s one reason dementia is so a horrible — you lose your memory, and with it yourself, slowly and by degree.

My brother doesn’t for one second like to talk about anything related to high school. He gets really upset when I indulge in one of my favorite pastimes, which is tripping down memory lane. I’m going to finally learn to steer clear of his past altogether. It’s very different from mine, for every imaginable reason siblings can be so different.

Surprisingly, however,  the other night we were able to have an interesting chat about the neighbors across the street from us when we were kids.   The father was a pediatrician  and his wife a social climber in the purest sense of the word — blonde, glamorous, attractive.  The marriage was a soap opera.   Her nickname was Mitty.  They had five children, not one of whom I had anything to do with.  One of the sons, Buddy, was a year older than me.  The first, and I think only time I was in their large house, which to an 11-year-old seemed like a huge mansion, I had a mini-faux-wrestling dust-up with him, which was unpleasant, and we never had anything to do with each again.

I only  saw him occasionally over the years until my junior year of high school when his father enlisted me to work as an usher in  a new theater he and some investors were building near the new mall.  Buddy and several of the other most popular guys in my high school also worked there, and then there was me, rather an outcast in my spiffy copper-colored blazer and bow tie with black pants uniform.  I did enjoy matinee rushes at the concession stand where I rapidly made batch after batch of that hideously greasy, but delicious-smelling movie theater popcorn.

All of this lead-up has a purpose, other than just sitting here as a random vignette of my early years.

On Oct. 11, 1961, my family moved into the nice, new house my parents had custom built with old New Orleans brick.  The day we moved in, and the following weeks and months,  were like some dream of a faraway place come true.  We were among the very first houses in a large tract of land that was to be developed in the coming years.  In back our house, and across the street up a block from where the doctor and his family lived, were dense south Louisiana woods and large live oak trees that became the exotic playground for my younger brother and I.  We gathered acorns for our slingshots and cut thin trees down and trimmed them for our spears as we stealthily made our way into the jungle, whacking away at undergrowth and listening out for the wild cries of birds and menacing jaguars that might be lurking in the distance.  What adventures!

I’ll never forget the “new house” smell and the polished oak floors in the hall and bedrooms, and the terrazzo floors in the den and kitchen.  Mom and Dad were so proud of this house they had built and which we had delighted in seeing rose up amid a small grove of live oaks.  It seemed like a huge house compared to the small apartment I had lived in previously.  There I had shared a bedroom with my brother (bunk bed) and my newly arrived little sister.  How on earth were three of us in one room?

The year 1961 was the classic story of arrival in middle class suburbia in the early Sixties.  Life was much more innocent and less frightening that later decades, and especially now in the horrendous year 2020, which to my young mind back then would have seemed positively out of some  nightmarish science fiction novel.

I was just a kid in 1961, and for the next couple of years.  But it wasn’t long before things started changing quite drastically. Our “jungle” was cleared for new streets and subdivisions. In back of our house, what once seemed like endless wilderness became new streets waiting  to be paved with concrete.  I remember there were huge mounds of dirt where the streets were being laid out, and atop one of those mounds, which were probably 30 feet high, my brother and I constructed a crude fort out of branches, small tree limbs and other debris from the land clearing.  For a little while longer, our imaginary childhood kingdom became a small outpost on a hill where we could hold off the marauding hordes of development and its coming discontents.  The live oaks  remained, but the woods were gone.  And when our “tropical jungle” was no more, also gone was that magical little corner of childhood.

Across the street, and for a mile or so back, more woods and fields were cleared, including the patch of blackberries, whose thorny thickets  we endured for the reward of Mom’s unforgettable blackberry cobbler.  In same patch of undergrowth I discovered  three baby rabbits one day.  By 1963 it was all gone.

Gone, too was the sheer innocence of childhood where our surroundings became for a time magical, and yet  foreboding wilderness, to be explored but never tamed.  That’s what the bulldozers did later.

By the time I was 13, I was “encouraged” along with my brother, to join the nearby country club swim team where we had the pleasure of seeing our summer vacations devolve into the agonizing ritual of swimming 50-100 laps during practice each morning to prepare us for the fiercely competitive swim meets with other country club teams.  Every morning we returned home on our bikes, exhausted and miserable, eyes stinging from chlorine in those days before goggles.  To add insult to injury, I lost all my races, while my brother won all his.  He had a basketful full of blue ribbons.  I had my tattered and injured 13-year-old pride.

Life changes so fast when in your adolescent years.  School was always a very serious enterprise for me and became much more so starting when I entered 7th grade.  I developed the beginnings of what I later realized was depression and OCD, and which I struggle with to this day.  A bully tormented me in 8th grade until I couldn’t take it anymore and had a faux fist fight with him in the gym after which he left me alone.

Life after acorns, slingshots, jungles, spears and forts became, more suddenly than gradually, a time to reckon with the loss of innocent pastimes and the pure escapism of childhood.  Of course, back then I didn’t grasp the psychology of all this, and how crucial memories would be later in adulthood as I strived to put the pieces of that vast puzzle together.

We went from watching “The Mickey Mouse  Club” and “Lassie” to “Green aAcres,”  “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show.“ In 7th grade I saw my first James Bond movie, “Goldfinger” with a new friend Twice in one afternoon.  It was so thrilling and so grown up.  And it wasn’t rated “R”.

Ah, were they really such “good old days?”  I could write  a lot more about those times, and already have.  For me, the past is vital to understanding the present.  That’s why I love the subject of history so much.  But it seems like today we haven’t learned the lessons of the past and you can see what’s happened because of that.

Me in 11th grade