Lower Topia • Chapter One
Episode 2
First Memory
The Victrola
Lower Topia 2022: I was daydreaming while patiently waiting for my turn to enter into the intersection. I’ve been doing that a lot lately. Thinking about where I came from, my childhood, growing up in a world much different than today. Also sitting at intersections waiting for the light to turn green is something of the new norm, as Lower Topia just keeps getting more populated. She brutely awakened me from my daydreams. “Where are you, Charles? You’re not listening to me. Are you going, or what?” She asked. Karen was trying to show me she was concerned, but I believed, with some underlining reasons, she was just being nosy. Because she seemed to really wanted to know, and partly because she habitually prods into my business, so she asked me, again, if I would attend Jim’s funeral. Everyone who was anyone in real estate in Lower Topia will be attending his funeral. Not so with me. “Not sure I will go” I replied with a little uncertainty in my voice. “But you knew him so well. You worked with him on projects, and even shared a beer at the Grill on Main Street,” Karen was trying to remind me of my obligations and respect for a dead friend. I agreed. “True, we were good friends, and I am so upset that he died. It will be a little lonelier without him.” Followed by, “But,” finishing my thought, “although he was a good friend, I never knew his family. They wouldn’t know me from a hole in the wall. Not even sure if Jim ever mentioned he knew me to his family. Why would I go if I don’t know them? I only knew Jim. He’s dead now.” “And,” as an afterthought, “besides, I never really had any other friends in real estate. Going to just say ‘hi’ to the other agents so they would acknowledge I was there, when in fact, I could give a shit if they did acknowledge me, seems wrong, maybe even a waste of my time.” I continued to sit there at the intersection now thinking about my own funeral. Who would come? Would his friends come or stay home as he is doing? Karen shrugged her shoulders, and focused now on her personal shopping list of things she needed to accomplish if Charles would ever move his car’s ass through this intersection.
How will I be remembered by others after I die? I truly believe that a person is remembered not because of who he was in the world he shared, but rather, he would be memorialized only because of the people what wanted to remember him. That all your deeds, good and selfish, won’t make a difference in 100 years, not even 50, but only if a person wanted to visit your grave site to freshen the flowers. I light heartedly wondered about that old man I met when I was much younger. I think he must had been around my age today. The old man that I used to criticize because of all the things he did like an “old man” would routinely do; walk with more caution, reacted with little patience to the events and people around him, always blaming the younger generation for all the wrong in his world. Now that I am his age, I want to find this old man to apologize. I get it now. Age finally gave me the opportunity to understand. I want to say to that old man that J am sorry for not understanding than. But I can’t find him now.
The traffic light is still red. I continued with my daydream, while Karen continued mumbling to an uninterested car. I was wondering if I finally entered into my Golden Years, although I don’t really believe I should be formally written into the same category as someone who past his 80th year. I figure that because I’m only 77 I should be exempt from being in that elderly group. “When are the Golden Years?” I remember 70 was considered old at one time, but now 80 has that designation. I think. Live till 80 and you had a “good life”; life like a song having its own specific genre. The “Golden Oldies” for him were Presley, Berry, Cole, Little Richard; however, to his son Houston, Collins, Joel, Mellencamp were the Golden Oldie names known. If you lived till 90 no one will even shed a tear; they’ll be too busy getting drunk and celebrating life, not necessarily yours, probably wouldn’t remember me anyway. Seriously, who has an attention span that can remember something 90 years old?
One night in 1947 I found himself reminiscing about my childhood. How far back does my first memory go? At what age did I finally remember what I saw, and made that vision part of my memory? Age 2? 5? Prenatal? Can I actually remember being in my mom’s womb? Undoubtedly, she drank wine and smoked cigarettes. Do I remember the fumes, the hacking, or getting drunk while curled up in her womb? Do I remember being bumped and pushed? Stop with that thought, how can I imagine my parents having sex, especially with me in-between. Disgusting, shivering at the image. Could I have remembered that, however? Hey, was that womb my first claustrophobic experience. Is it that memory of being a fetus the reason why some of us, me in particular, are suffocating in tight moist spaces today? So, do I remember that warm chamber of fluid and gas. Or are the recollections I have today simply because I saw a picture in a photo album, when I was very young, and now emblazoned in my hippocampus, neocortex and the amygdala, if, at 77, mine are still working. I recalled that day; the day I stood next to the Victrola. I think I do; I think it was an actual memory. I was a very young child; maybe 2 or 3. I was holding on to the leg of a table, and saw later in a photograph, that on the table was a record player; I was too short to see anything but the table leg. My mother told me about it later, with the aid of the photograph to prove it; the picture was even annotated in her handwriting ‘Charlie – 2 years old. August 1947’. Okay, I was 2 years old. This event was then not a memory of an actual event, but rather of a printed image. With no actual recall, the only logical reason my mother was nervously scolding me, I would surmise, was that I as stood there, and as I grabbed onto one of the table’s legs, I apparently was shaking the table, the Victrola, some type of “arm” with an inserted sharp needle, and a fragile ceramic disc sitting on a revolving table. All so complicated for a 2-year-old to understand, let alone a story to invent. I guess, now, this table leg would have afforded me the needed balance to maintain my vertical position, a survival instinct which was reason enough to continue and ignore the coaching; I was tired of crawling. My mother told me later that she had to remind me repetitively on multiple occasions to “let go of the table Charley!” Either I was a stubborn child, or totally determined. I don’t remember. I’m trying to remember my mother’s warnings, nagging. I remember that her voice had a British accent when she was annoyed or angry. But that’s all I can recall. I do miss that accent. But I can’t remember her actually telling me “you’ll either push the table over, or scratch the record with the needle if you keep shaking the table, Charley.” A stern prediction Charley didn’t understand than, and I don’t remember now. My memory is hungry for a memory of my own. The only proof that this ever happened is now just a picture, and some recalls of her stories. Was this the only type of memory I would ever have of those days? Charlie would know.
Same day in Lower Tropia 2022 I’ve been sitting in my car for about three minutes waiting, an eternity, before it became my turn to pass through the intersection. It takes a long time to cross over 6 lanes of traffic today in Lower Topia. When I first arrived here, there were only. 2 lanes to cross. Karen seemed to have been mandated the role of reminding me of this fact. Daydreams help pass the time.
Claflin Avenue 1948 Do I have any early memories that were my own; not conjured up by a picture or a story? I remember being taught my first socially appropriate sexual gesticulation; the difference between how boys cross their leg when they sit and how girls do it. I truly didn’t understand the rule then and certainly object to it now. It obviously more of an issue of modesty, as I was taught by my mom’s friend’s daughter one afternoon as we were sitting on the steps leading into our Bronx apartment on Claflin Ave. What’s modesty, I remember wondering? I objected; I liked the way girls crossed their legs; it was much more comfortable. I remembered entering the front door of his nursery school classroom; and finger painting, I loved finger painting. I do remember the school was the only house on this Bronx street lined with medium rise apartment brick buildings. I remember walking to my nursing school with my mother; it only a few buildings down from my apartment building. Google maps would support that, if that building I see from the “Street View” was indeed my school. I remember walking on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx with my mother, raising my toy red fire truck when I saw the real one speeding down the center of the avenue under the elevated subway tracks. I remember that some baseball stadium was close by; that was where my father took my brother and me on those special weekends when he wanted to bond with his sons. I remember PS 86, only for its musty smell and dingy hallways; hardly anything that had to do with lessons taught there. We left the Bronx when I was 5; I remember that. I hated going to school in my new school district; I had to take a bus to school. I remember that. And before that move, I have clear memories of images of me standing under my apartment, after playing by myself on the streets that circled my Bronx home. I would beckon for my mother for a snack. I did that yelling from 3 stories directly under my parent’s bedroom window. My mother threw out a peeled carrot wrapped in a napkin as I stood there. I never caught the package, ever. Ate the carrot, with my mother’s approval, after retrieving it as it rolled on the sidewalk. “Don’t forget to throw the napkin in the garbage pail when you are done,” my mom would instruct. I guess we didn’t care, back then, that the carrot rolled on the sidewalk as a toddler chased after it. I remember my mother telling me that I shouldn’t make fun of the man with a disfigured face, “that could be you one day, if I didn’t stop frowning”, was my mother’s time worn, well-established advice. There were also memories of living in a large single bedroom apartment at 2878 Claflin Avenue, Bronx NY; sharing this bedroom with my parents and my brother. I remember my first dinner, in my new home at 24 Hearth Lane Levittown, NY, was cold butter spread on white bread; the butter, back then was a solid stick and the bread tore apart under the pressure of the knife and the hard butter. But those memories were of me as a 3, maybe a 5, year old. Nothing earlier. I kept on trying to remember.
Lower Topia 2022 Eventually the light turned green and I moved on through the intersection; looking forward to getting Karen to her destination, and having the car to myself again.
