Dandelion

At the moment there are no tenants in the student rental across the street, and the front lawn is unmowed.  But since the last time I looked at it, something has happened: along with the high grass are dandelions, lots of them.  Now I notice that they are on the fringes of our front lawn as well.

Dandelions were the flowers of my childhood--dandelions and violets and a few others that occupy the area between wildflowers and weeds in the current view of such things.  Other flowers belonged to adults, who grew them, pampered and discussed them, and praised them, making them sources of individual pride.  We children therefore were warned to stay clear of them.  We were never to run in their flowerbeds, or pick them, or even get close to them.

Adults did not care about dandelions.  In fact, they regarded them as harbingers of disgrace if they appeared on the lawn.  Better a dead- looking brown crewcut lawn than a green one with too much yellow in it.  Scandalous!   Dandelionus! Out comes the heavy artillery power mowers of the neighborhood, shattering Sunday silence with the roar and whine of tank battalions on maneuvers.  (Well, by the 1960s anyway.)

But throughout my early childhood there was a field two lots long between my house and that of two of my pals, brothers who lived "next door."  Dandelions ruled there.  We could run through them, roll around in them, pick them, smell and taste them, play with them.  If we'd wanted we could have decorated bikes and hats with them, and disassembled them to make yellow checkers or hairy yellow eyes, and nobody would have cared.  We definitely did chase butterflies or lightning bugs through them, or just scrunched down to see them close-up, and regard the world through yellow caps.

The dandelions of my childhood in western Pennsylvania looked like those above.  Those on the lawns hereabouts are like this one, with a more defined center.   Their textures are slightly different, and they seem to have longer stems.  The California variety is more like other--or recognized-- California wildflowers.  The PA version seems scruffier. Or maybe I'm imagining that. But that's the one that lives in my childhood.

Past: Easter Parade

Easter was a pretty big deal where and when I grew up.  Because I went to Catholic schools, there was an even bigger buildup to it than to Christmas.  It started with ashes on Ash Wednesday and that began Lent.  We all had to decide what we would give up for Lent, in addition to the stuff everybody was supposed to give up.  Forty days of it, pal.  Endless.

Then finally Holy Week:  Holy Thursday (the Last Supper, the betrayal), Good Friday (the events of the Stations of the Cross, ending with the Crucifixion), Holy Saturday (Christ in his tomb), Easter (Christ's resurrection from the dead.)  Holy week was Christian and not just Catholic (and downtown was dotted with impressive churches of several denominations), so a lot of stores in town would be closed from noon to three p.m. on Friday, commemorating the hours on the cross. All the stores would of course be closed on Easter Sunday.  Especially since they were closed every Sunday.

The same confusing combinations of secular, folk and religious traditions as Christmas were more extreme at Easter, the feast of blood, death and chocolate.  A bloody scourging, carrying the cross, nailed to it, crucified, dead in the tomb, then gone.  Hearing about all this in great detail in school was usually followed by attending the appropriate ceremony in church.  There was usually a church pretty handy to the school.

So after being assaulted with all this, it was home to decorate eggs, smell the baking, maybe a taste or two of batter or icing. I guess the egg decorating was on Saturday. My only clear memory of this was at my grandmother's, on her white tablecloth in the dining room (same as in the photo above.)The mysteries of food coloring, dipping eggs in hot water, watching them turn yellow or blue and fishing them out when they were your desired shade.  I liked the coloring.  Any decorating beyond that wasn't my style.  I was a minimalist.  And I didn't eat the eggs.  Yucky.

Dressing up for Easter Sunday Mass, a bigger deal for my sisters, but if my mother felt I needed a new shirt or suit or something, I usually got it for Easter.  Maybe a new clip-on bow tie!  I found one photo of my sister Kathy and I in our Easter best, but we were obviously in such a foul mood glowering at the camera that I shouldn't post it.  I'm wearing a snazzy hat, too.

Easter morning there would be our Easter baskets. Chocolate eggs and chocolate bunnies (some were hollow, which was disappointing, but the solid chocolate ones you could gnaw on for hours), marshmallow peeps, jelly beans.

And the Easter Parade.  Which always confused me because there wasn't one.  Just people crowding out of church like every Sunday. But we had to dress up for one anyway.

My grandmother gave us some live Easter chicks (or "peeps") a few times.  They generally didn't make it to chickenhood, though one did.  He hung around for quite a long time, pecking away in the yard. His name was Elmer.

Easter dinner would pretty invariably be at my grandmother's.  It would be the usual feast--the wedding-style soup, pasta dish, meat course (usually roast chicken--sorry, Elmer), salad, and a dozen side dishes.  And my grandmother would distribute the unique Easter pastries she made for us.  They were thick cookie objects shaped like dolls for the girls and horses with a kind of handle at the top for the boys, covered in icing and sprinkles.  This was the only day of the year that these appeared.

This photo above is from fairly late in the game, about 1964. (Click on it to see it without the right edge cut off.)  I'm in the back row, holding my horse.  I'm about to go off to college in a few months.  Next to me, holding one of her children (Nancy) is Rose Severini, my aunt.  Next to her on the right is my grandfather, Ignazio Severini.  This photo doesn't scan very well for some reason, so it's probably hard to make things out.  (Also the shadows of my head and Aunt Rosie's head have merged with our hair.) But the horse my grandfather is holding is covered with chocolate icing--his favorite--so it's more visible.

The front row is my cousin Susan Severini, my sister Debbie, Tom Severini, my grandmother Giaconda with a baby, which must be Steve Severini, and Shirley Severini.

It's not clear in this photo but on the left side of the table is a cake shaped and decorated like a lamb, its white frosting laden with coconut flakes.  Another of my grandmother's specialties, only at Easter.  I'm not sure what that is in the center.  High over our heads is a portrait of a family member from Italy, but I don't recall who.

The lamb is a Christ symbol. (There were lots of fish side dishes at dinner, another Christ symbol.) The eggs, bunnies and chicks however belong to the original feasting day that Easter is superimposed on, celebrating spring and the generating of new life.  There is also a tradition that people went eggless for Lent, and children were presented with a basket of decorated eggs at Easter to celebrate Lent's end.

Horses and dolls, I have no idea, but safe to say, Italian.  Chocolate is apparently a modern American addition, due to availability and the eager support of chocolate manufacturers, as well as the general rule that any excuse is a good excuse for chocolate.

But I am reminded that despite this melange of "traditions", there were boundaries between them, and lines you didn't cross.  Like the chocolate crucifix I saw on sale a few Easters ago.  That would have been considered sacrilegious.

Past: First Memories

My first memories come from that hazy time when I was two or three years old.  I can date those memories that much only because they happened in an apartment where I lived for the first three or so years of my life, before moving into the "foundation" that became the basement of the house I grew up in after that.

But why do I have these particular memories?  Why don't I have more?  And are they actually my memories?

Douwe Draaisma addresses these questions in his book Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older.  He does so (here and throughout this book) by recounting and synthesizing various studies done over the years, as well as comparing observations and conclusions with literary and historical sources.  All of this is fascinating reading, but here I'm mostly sticking to the answers.

What do we remember from these early years? It may depend on how old you are when asked what you remember: retention seems to decline over the years.  But the average age of the first memory is about three years old.

Why that memory?  It tends to be associated with strong emotions.  One study found is it usually fear, while another found that feelings of elation or surprise were more frequent.  My first memory combines elation and surprise, which must include a little fear: it is of arriving on the landing outside our third (and top) floor apartment, on my father's shoulders.

Like mine, it is usually a visual memory.  But that's a little deceptive.  For it seems that the reason we don't have more memories from these early years--where our minds are very active, and we're experiencing lots of things for the first time--has to do with language.

Researchers believe all memories still exist somewhere in the brain.  The problem is accessing them.  In order to make access possible, we sort memories into categories.  Though we don't necessarily do this consciously, it requires a level of language, and an ability to deal with abstractions (like categories) that we don't have in our earliest years.  In fact, memories may not form without the ability to describe them in language (even if that's the daily babble of toddlers in their beds or cribs, talking to themselves in their own terms about what they've recently experienced.)

But depositing memories into categories also works against remembering specific events if they are repeated.  The first trip to the zoo becomes conflated with the second and third trips until all specific memories of the zoo recede and seemingly disappear.

Another reason that we seldom have memories from the first year may be that we lack the consciousness of self--the "I"--to form autobiographical memories.  Forming the "I" implies the "you," and so first memories may also include recognition of a parent as someone not "I."  (Dr. D. notes first memories by writers Nabokov and Edith Wharton that supports this idea.)

But how real are those first memories?  Some first memories can be checked with others who were there, and it sometimes turns out they remember it differently.  And sometimes there is even objective evidence that shows it isn't quite true to what happened--it happened here when you remember it as there.

Or it didn't happen at all.  Maybe my father didn't ride me on his shoulders that time (it wasn't something he did a lot.) But it's still a memory.

This is where the relationship of memories and the language to describe them becomes more complicated and perhaps troublesome.  One person remembered an attempt to kidnap him out of his stroller, when it turned out that it had never happened--it was a story he was told, a lie by his nanny that she later admitted.  Yet he had pictured it happening.

A lot of memories--including first memories, and maybe especially those--turn out to be stories we've heard, perhaps combined with some incoherent impressions we seem to remember.  That may be what happened with another of my early "memories" that might even be the first: I remember playing quietly under the bed.

I focused on this memory--re-remembered it--when I heard the story, told by both my mother and her sister, though each told it to me separately, many years apart--of the afternoon when I was a baby that I disappeared from that same apartment.

They had been talking when one of them noticed they could no longer hear me and I wasn't in sight.  They called me and searched the apartment without finding me. My aunt noticed that a window was slightly open.  My mother told me she thought about Lindbergh baby kidnapping (though that had happened more than a decade earlier, it evidently made an impression.)  They were both frightened.

One of them soon found me asleep under the bed.  I had crawled under there, played awhile and fallen asleep.  Was my memory from that day? Or was it a perspective I dimly recall from several adventures under the bed?  I think the second alternative is more likely.

We may feel pieces of memories that get located by repetition (I seem to remember how my mother sang to me when I was a baby, but I also saw her sing to my younger sisters) or by familiar objects etc., as well as by stories.

For example, I don't remember the actual moment this photo was taken of me at 2 yrs. old, on the phone at my grandparents' house. But I remember the phone and the phone table and where they were because they were there for years.  And I seem to remember that sweater with the ducks, but do I?  I don't recall the colors (I want to guess blue-gray with yellow ducks.)  Maybe I just remember photographs like this one.

I wonder if these vague impressions plus stories we hear later account for both the richness and mystery of our childhood memories.  I see my curly blond locks that I don't recall, but I remember my mother's story of crying when they were cut off at the barber shop.

Of course once we tell the story of the first memory (or formulate it in our heads), what we basically remember is our story, as the actual memory recedes. That may account for the odd fact that we often see ourselves in the memory (as one researcher found), rather than seeing the scene from our point of view at the time. The story of the memory is what gets fixed in our heads.  It's called autobiographical memory, and autobiographies are stories, after all.