Perfectly Remembered

or

Fact or Fiction

I came back to Italy this year to write. I have been plagued for years with the need to tell the story of my life. Granted, it really has been an amazing journey to this point. Almost seventy-three years to put a point on the point.

Point taken

Among the many things I discovered during this Italian Pause is that everyone has a story, many stories.  Are they all as interesting and compelling as mine?  I’ve read a lot.  I read a lot. There are, indeed, many compelling autobiographies out there. The problem I encountered (block?) was that after diving in great guns and writing close to 20,000 words in a few days, I found I was only up to age three.

I am not that compelling a person

I am not famous, outside my own head. I am only infamous in the minds of a few of those who know (knew) me well.  Yes, I have lived in astonishing places, during astonishing times, and have been witness to global events of all magnitude, firsthand.  The “duck and cover” cold war antics of the 50’s and 60’s while living just outside of Washington, D.C.  The extreme party that was San Francisco in the 1970’s, and the ensuing AIDS meltdown that, eventually, claimed virtually everyone I knew…except me.  The killing of Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone. The 9/11 horror show from the front row seat of my childhood home, less than 20 miles from the Pentagon.

These do not a best-seller make

To set the stage for whatever I decide comes next, I should at least lay a foundation of reference. I was born squarely in the Boomer generation after WWII.  I had a sister born ten years earlier, placing her right at the beginning of the war and coming of age with Poodle Skirts.  We were effectively two separate generations.  She left home when I was seven for college, marriage, kids; a “normal” life in those years.

There I was, eight years old in 1960.  Alone in the country with parents who, not to put too fine a point on things, hated each other. A few years later, as a teen, I would beg them to just divorce and get on with things.  Age is a great perspectivizer. Middle-class, middle-aged people still did not divorce then, murder was probably more common.  Looking back, it was almost a statistic in my own home, murder that is, but that incident came fifty years to the day after they were married.

I grew up on a country lane, three miles long, with about two dozen families, mostly Catholics with a sprinkling of Quakers and me, the almost sole Episcopalian of child rearing age parents left.  Catholic-Lite as I referred to it.  Fresca and Tab were all the rage.  Fresca is still quite tasty today.  I cut my fake sugar teeth on it then, and still pack the pantry with it today. The number of kids in each of these families was between five and fifteen.  No lie. Our three-mile-long, meandering, one-lane path we called the road, had over sixty children on it.  

Talk about odd child out

A miracle occurred in 1960, a Catholic one if you will.  A young family moved into a rambling, historic, old, (1790-ish) home with four kids and two more to follow in the years to come.  They were loud (Greek), exotic (French) and in later years we referred to ourselves a Freeks.  You do the Wuzzle.  I was alone with, essentially, the Battling Ambersons, as the 1942 classic, The Magnificent Ambersons, was colloquially called.  My parents, married in 1939, could have been the prototypes save for the fact that Booth Tarkington wrote the book in 1918.  My parents were born in 1912.  Parallel lives.

Rather than play in my own backyard, the farm next door seemed simply throbbing with life.  A stay-at-home exotic French mother, a flamboyantly handsome Greek father.  They were completely mainstream, overachieving, upper middle-class Americana. Matching new cars every other year, a rakish sedan for dad, a high-end station wagon for mom. There was life going on there.

So that’s where I migrated

I suppose you could say I fled the battle scene

The perfectly remembered tale begins here.  It lasted ten years.  We were eighteen and launched by then but none of us, we who were whelped on the road, remembered anything other than a country idyll.  Many of us (those remaining today) are still in touch.  For decades we have referred to our childhoods as “perfect”.  Free Range children.  We packed bag lunches, extra batteries for the transistor radio, tacked up the horses, and off we went early each summer morning with the provisor from our mothers to “be home for dinner”.  We had virtually a thousand-acre playground of wood, creeks, pastures, abandoned buildings, everything our young minds could turn into stage sets for our wildest imaginings. Decades past, we continued to reimagine time there as pastorally perfect.

Until I started this book-piece-project

In all honesty, the warts were being processed and burned off for a long time now. The bloom was well off that faded rose.  As adults, we slowly began to fill in those pesky dark corners that we, as children, had no language for.  Yes, we knew there were unexplained bruises on thighs and butts, discipline, different in every household.  But the more the years rolled on and the more we talked to each other, framed through the harsh lens of today’s realities, the finer details of those formative years became too much to run from, even under the guise of our Perfectly Remembered childhood.

Abuse, it steals our souls before we know them

It became more and more important, in my mind at least, to unpack this “perfect” childhood and rejigger my increasingly age-related, faulty, memory.  What was real about our perfect childhoods?  What was the fiction we all told ourselves and each other?  Where was all the dirt we had quite obviously swept under the carpet edges?

My quest turned obsession centered, naively, on the premise of Perfect. I was still telling myself the fiction of what I wanted to believe, what we all wanted to believe.  The need to tell my story, as it turns out, was based on this collective fiction that we kids had created, enhanced, and bolstered throughout the decades. At one point, maybe 40 years on, we even had a road reunion with many of the original kids, and some kid’s kids, gathered at my mother’s house for a brunch.  From there, we all walked the entire road, stopping in at each of the homes where original owners still lived.  The reactions of these old-timers, I believe, reinforced our fictional fantasy, ding-ding, “Honey!  Come here, the “kids” are back!”

We sauntered along, pointing out our old tree forts, the streams we used to dam, where the mean horses lived, where the fun Halloween candy came from. One of my immediate neighbors, an unmarried couple in the 60’s, had an original Scotch Cooler which they filled with a mix of candy and change, nickels, dimes and quarters!  We were encouraged to dive our fists into the tub and scoop out as much as we wanted! At another farm, the same one I would eventually call my ersatz home, there were  two elderly spinster sisters.  They insisted that all of our costumed selves come in and sit around the kitchen table while they served us homemade angel food cake with Hershey’s chocolate sauce and a cup of steaming hot cocoa. Further enhancement of a collectively faulty memory bank.  

Who else has these kinds of memories?

Decades on, we were now the adults in the room.  As the years passed, we slowly began to open up to each other, individually, and discuss the rumors that had permeated our young minds.  Who had been beaten in the name of discipline?  Who had endured sexual inappropriateness from a parent?  Whose parents were true and dysfunctional alcoholics? And much later on, after gut-wrenching conversations with what I considered siblings, about the rape and incest that was happening in my own home.  We never discussed any of this with each other no less told a parent.  I spent ten years living almost daily in this house.  These people were my heart and soul.  Yes somehow, I never saw, knew, or experienced any of this horror show until it was revealed to me when I was well over 50 years old. A death-bed confession, forced from a father by an abused child themselves, shattered any illusions I had about my childhood.

That was the force that propelled me to decide I need to write my own story.  It was deflection at its finest on my part.  I thought that if I told my perfect childhood story, in detail, it would somehow mitigate the shitshow that was beginning, finally, to come to light.  I was unwilling to concede my dream, my history, my life, to the dustbin.  I had actively chosen the players in my young life for their qualities that enhanced my life story and mitigated the mistreatment at home. That would force an incredibly painful abandonment of everything I had told myself, that we had told each other, about who we were then, and are now, because of this unexplored history.

Enter reality

So, Italy, my long-anticipated stretch of time to myself where I was to craft at least the beginnings of this book, was upon me.  The more I wrote, the more I realized the great lie.  The series of lies. The fictional world that we kids had created, I believe, stemming from our collective need to find a new normal that successfully masked the truly amazing stories of abuse that were the true foundations of each of our adult personalities.  We all had a “funny uncle”, a crazy grandparent, acceptable tales to be trotted out at family dinners with the parents.

What was never talked about was the whack-job sibling whose politics veered into unimaginable right-wing obsession. Or another sibling whose rage and resentment against all of the family festered into an Uber-Christian fundamentalism that forced their entire family into a froth of toxicity that no talk-therapy could ever penetrate. These were the hidden scars that never healed.  How could they?  They were never known, until now.

The explosions were everywhere

Like the never-ending Middle East wars, skirmishes erupted, phycological bombs detonated, over and over again.  Each new revelation gave fuel to a growing fire within us all that was threatening to demolish all the good things that we actually did have.  It turns out, the good things we had were each other.  We had saved ourselves.  By telling the fairy tale of our young lives, repeating it back like we were memorizing the multiplication tables, we had cemented a false narrative that we all clung to in order not to have to deal with the reality.  The reality was too painful.  The loss would be too great. Our old ages would be warped and distorted if we had to really face the music.

I decided my book was not what was needed. I chose, instead, to write what I write best, observational ramblings on life; mine, ours, theirs. If I can correct a bit of history along the way, great.  If I can process some of my own traumas into submission, even better. 

That leaves me back in a café in Italy with my friend Nick, trying to work out what my childhood was really about, even as I was describing bits of it to him.  How could I have lived and perpetuated this lie for all these years? How could I move forward, at my age, while my most firmly held and precious memories were disintegrating more every day? Nick was watching me process as I was talking, and he summed up my entire childhood instantly.

“It was perfectly remembered”