Cringing and typing: the blogger at age 15

Facebook. How you dredge up the past. I mean, this is pretty harmless, but it’s still dredging. A few months ago, a friend from a camp I attended in the summer of 1991 contacted me on Facebook, and sent along a pdf of a two-page essay I wrote when I was 15. I guess I was pretty proud of this essay if I was handing out to camp friends. Jesus.

Barnard College, New York City (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It was a camp for young suburbanites to experience the splendor of the big city: a month living in a dorm and taking classes at Barnard College, in New York. It was paradise for the slightly awkward, slightly arty teen. We traipsed up and down Broadway like we, as many other fresh, eager-types before us, owned it. We dicked around campus, and museums. We were self-proclaimed masters of the M4 bus. We ordered Chinese takeout to our rooms like big shots, stayed up late, socialized on uncomfortable common room furniture, and amused ourselves with an endless series of inside jokes.  They must have been OK jokes, though; several of the people I lived with at 49 Claremont Avenue are still my good friends. And I mean in the real world, beyond Facebook. PCP ’91!

We bought ten-packs of subway tokens in tiny plastic bags and went way downtown on the 1/9 to Greenwich Village, which is still my favorite place on earth. Sometimes we messed up and got on the express and just hung out at Chambers Street, whatever. Everything was exciting; as much fun as we had going to Shakespeare in the Park and a Violent Femmes concert at the Beacon Theatre, we had roaming the aisles at Love’s Pharmacy. We were old enough to shop for our own shampoo, old enough to decide when to go eat at Tom’s Diner, when to go the dining hall, and when to sleep through class.

I wrote the essay in question in high school, in 1990, for a writing contest (which I won, that’s right!). My friend found it at his mother’s house as she was clearing out old things.  And if I have the stomach for it, one day I’ll go through my parents things, and find the rest of the things I wrote at this brash and hopeful time, which I think even includes poetry inspired by Sylvia Plath (yikes), and my college essay, in which I described my love for the mysteries of New York, and why I wanted to go back, across the street from Barnard, to Columbia. Which I did.

As punishment to myself, I will retype the entire essay, resisting to the urge to correct anything or insert commentary on poor turns of phrase, or missed opportunities for jokes, and let it be. I am not sure why anyone would want to read it, although I still think it’s kind of funny, but if a blog ends up being nothing but a chronicle of one’s self, to be read at a future date, and wonder why, then this needs to form a part.

The Origin of Soul: The Story of Creation

 

In the beginning, there was James Brown.

That’s all there was. No glinting silver moon, no life sustaining sun. The stars were not the watchful eyes of heaven, and no beavers built their dams on the nonexistent churning blue streams. No pine trees shaded the eyes of prancing human beings. There was no life, no universe.

No universe, that is, until that something, that supreme, superior being, that godfather of all creatures, James Brown, felt good. He felt so good, so powerful, just as he knew that he would, that he was sparked with the divine inspiration to create the Earth out of soul, a sharp scream, and brown polyester.

The Earth, soul kitchen, sea of raving fans soon to be, and James Brown’s dance floor. A quick dance step, a quiver of his hips, and there was his glowing disco ball, pure and simple, ready for him to adulterate. What magic, what wonder! That was the first day.

On the first night, Mr. James Brown threw a party, a bash for the masses of nothingness. To decorate and shine proudly upon his new world like his white teeth, he created the sun, the moon, and a myriad of twinkling stars. Hallelujah!

On the second day, James Brown felt nice. So, hence appeared an abundance of humans, sugar, and spice. There were plenty of women, and no jive. The party continued, as it always will, and this time the decorations were the forests primeval, and the oceans blue and teal. Mr. Brown wore his earth brown suit to match his Eden.

On the third day, James Brown did another nifty little jig and created the party animals to follow him and worship him like no other. The panthers, cheetahs, and cockatoos loved their Creator with all their dancing hearts.

And the earth was complete! Glory be, James Brown created Grooveday (now called Sunday, as the term “groovy” is passe), to rest in his yacht in the gleaming Pacific and recover from hangovers. He had now earned the much deserved title of “The Hardest Working Man in Creation.” So be it!

But, as nothing is perfect except the master himself, evil–sinning, blade-sharp evil–began to spawn and grow within the Godfather’s own sideburns. Wars wreaked havoc across the earth, and the globe, once crystal blue, was now tinged with black, stinging crime.

February 1973, Musikhalle, Hamburg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Why, oh why,” the people wanted to know, “did James, the Man, thrust this upon us?”

As they did not want to take responsibility for their own actions, James Brown’s sons and daughters sent him to the jail cell to purge all the world’s sins. Heartbroken and stained by his own blood, The Almighty Brown sent M.C. Hammer, musician in disguise, to rule in his place.

“That will show them!” he thought, as his feet were bound and halted from grooving. “The fools know not what they do!”

And lo, show them it did. During the years our James, our Creator, was sadly incarcerated, the world was driven to tears by the horrid sounds of the Hammer. Finally, the people broke through the clogged-up tunnel, saw the light, and praise Soul! James Brown pounded the pavement once again! He forgave everybody.

And the world, and James Brown, and all the party animals in the forest, felt good once again. Amen! Hallelujah!

As long as we don’t have to open any jars, we lefties can rule the world

Left hand writing the German word “Linkshänder.” (Wikipedia)

Hello. How are you today? Here’s my credit card. Thank you. Where should I sign? Of course. Sorry, I just have to turn the paper a bit…what? Yes, I am left-handed. Thank you. I know. It’s a gift.

Don’t be jealous. Being left-handed is special. You ninety-percenters, right-handers of the world, don’t get to have that constant reminder that we lefties have, every time we pull out a pencil or fail to open a can, that we are different. Rarified. No matter how mundane our days ever are, we can always hold on to that. And we often have to hold on to something, as we stumble our way through a mirror-image world.

Yes, I know how we suffer. It’s terribly difficult. Being left-handed lets you feel like a martyr without ever having to sacrifice anything significant. Except our life expectancy. There’s that, perhaps. O we rare, delicate birds.

But that’s not enough about how great it is to be left-handed. We keep the finest company. Though we only make up about one-tenth of the world population, a disproportionate number of our coterie have soared to great heights. Alexander the Great, famously. Joan of Arc, our patron saint! Now I know how Joan of Arc felt! Julius Caesar! Aristotle! Charlemagne! Napoleon! Queen Victoria! Prince William! Great leaders all! And four of the last seven U.S. presidents? Lefties. Five if you count Ronald Reagan who was ambidextrous. Which I don’t. They’re just right-handers trying to steal our thunder, these so-called “ambidextrous” types.

He’s suffered ever so much.

Back to the real lefties: Paul McCartney and David Bowie. Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Bart Simpson! Chewbacca…BOTH Olsen twins. Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Tom Cruise! I could go on. OK, I will: Neil Armstrong, Jack the Ripper, Angelina Jolie! Is there any star left in the firmament? I think I’ve named them all.

So why is the world so against us? We are already a bit left out, as it were, when it comes to navigating the everyday world. Can’t open wine, sharpen a pencil, drive a car, use stairs, walk in a straight line…the list goes on. In some sports it’s an advantage to be a southpaw, sure, but I, personally, am still working on wounds received when I took Fencing for PE at college. The instructor, who had a Prince Valiant haircut in real life and claimed to be a member of a deposed Hungarian royal family, took one look at my grasp of a foil and gave up on me. He asked me to please stand to the side, and just observe. Infidel! I say!

And once, in a neurologist’s office, as I was ticking boxes of known “diseases” in the family, I came across, listed alongside cancer and epilepsy and other actual conditions: LEFT-HANDEDNESS. Now, see here! Offense! It’s bad enough my mother had to write away to a shop in Boston when I was in first grade to get scissors that I could use without embarrassment!

I couldn’t use them never mind run with them at school. (Wikipedia)

Being left-handed may not be a bona-fide medical condition, but it is a mystery. No one really understands why a minority of people like me, and my younger son, and a few other excellent people I know, are left-handed. There have been theories of every variety: lefties killed a right-handed twin in the womb (If only! But debunked), or there is perhaps some sort of evolutionary advantage to right-hand dominance. But it’s never been truly understood. So that leaves only one explanation: lefties must be evil.

I don’t need to rehash all of the terms, in all of the languages, that equate left-handedness with being less-than, or worse. Maybe I do a little. Our word sinister come from the Latin term for left; today, in Italy, left is sinistra. And dexterity? Comes from dexter, the Latin for right. Do you want to be gauche, on the Left Bank or anywhere else? No, of course, it is right to be droit. Right? Right.

Now that looks like a party. Left Handers’ Day in Leicester Sq, London, August 13.

And wasn’t it just a short time ago on Downton Abbey that the Earl of Grantham called Catholics “left-footers“? The Earl has been cocking things up royally lately, but he really, as they say in Hungary, bal lábbal kel fel, or got up with the left foot on this one (Am I right, Coach Valiant?). And besides, the Catholics don’t go in for lefties much either. My left-handed great-aunt told me she was struck on the hand with a ruler by nuns until she started writing with her right hand. But her penmanship was excellent, at least.

Fortunately for me and my son, we are free now to write left-handed, to turn our papers 90 degrees to the right so we don’t smudge all our words. These days, the malicious connotations of left-handedness can no longer harm us, like they did our aunt.

But, in a way, I love those cruel terms and backhanded compliments, because they have persisted so long. Thousands of years old by now, our attitude toward left-handers has become vestigial, no longer with any real meaning, but still present in our language, and in a world engineered under the assumption that right is still right.

Of course, other prejudices are just as old and still full of venom – those must go away. But for lefties, the wounds have healed over, and the scars just remind us of our older selves. They are palimpsests, old meanings smudged and written over with new hands. Like the groundhog peeking out from under the surface of the earth, on the old holy day of Imbolc, which we can no longer pronounce nor understand yet still celebrate. And today, Valentine’s Day: who knows what that is really about anymore, or how it began, but it still gets us through the long winter and lets chocolate shops and florists thrive. Then there’s King Richard III, palimpsest personified, recently uncovered in a churchyard in Leicester, now a parking lot, with his left arm now proven to be whole.

The discovery of the skeleton of Richard III is a reminder of how the past is really never put to rest. No king has had a legacy so cemented in infamy as he, with a great Shakespearean tragedy to back up his bad name to boot. But bones were uncovered, and the truth comes roaring back to life. Maybe, we realize centuries later, he was misunderstood.

I’m just a soul whose intentions are good. From the National Portrait Gallery, London.

So, given that it takes centuries, or longer, for the truth to catch up with us, I’m going to start a new mythology of lefties, and I’ll be long gone once anyone figures it out. By then, this blog, the ur-text for this new story, will no longer be readable, just a lot of gibberish encoded on the future’s equivalent of a Betamax tape. So, ha ha.

Here goes: did you know that lefties are the descendants of an ancient line of Mesopotamian kings and queens, who are all beautiful and graceful, with perfect pitch and really good taste in clothes? And according to ancient legend, on St. Valentine’s Day, you should honor all lefties that you meet with a small bow, a few dance moves, a bouquet of peonies and some Cadbury chocolates? AND they are entitled to free drinks all the time, coffee, wine, or juice boxes, upon proof of penmanship? Well, now you know! So, go! The winter of our discontent? Is over!

Thanks in advance! (Wikipedia)

Related articles:

• Clumsy and cack-handed? Lefties are leaders, not losers | Mind your language (The Guardian)
• On the Left Hand, There Are No Easy Answers (The New York Times)
• The Shape of a Life: Richard III’s Twisted Bones (The New Yorker)
• Unraveling King Richard III’s Secrets (The Daily Beast)

A child’s history of time

Sometimes when I drive the boys around town I take intentionally circuitous routes, thinking they won’t notice an extra five minutes tacked on to their journey. It’s an extra five minutes of peace for me, keeping them in their car seats, contained, controlled, unable to leap out and run away or start smacking each other about the head.

But lately, C has been on to me. We are taking the long way home from an after-school trip to the supermarket.

“You’re taking the long way! You’re doing it on purpose, to make me tired!” He knows a few extra minutes in the car will push him into nap territory, which is fine with me. “We live the other way! Turn around!”

But sometimes he is in the mood to relent, to relax, to stare out the window for a while, only to be interrupted by T screaming when he sees a bus or a fire truck. Amid the yelling, C waxes philosophical:

“The first people who ever lived,” he starts, “who were their mommies and daddies? If they were the first people, whose tummy were they in?”

That’s a hard one. “It’s a mystery,” I tell him. “We can’t know for sure, because none of us were there. But scientists can look at clues they find in nature and guess.”

The back seat is quiet. There are no buses around. I can almost feel C thinking back there, trying to unravel time. Another thought:

“So, how did all of this get here?” He flaps a hand toward the window. “Who put the trees here, and the houses? Did the first people do that?”

A lot to wrap my head around while I’m wheel-to-wheel with lunatic Boston drivers. “When the world was new, many many years ago,” I begin, “none of this was here. There were no streets, no houses, just nature. Trees, and rivers, and animals. And when humans came around they slowly started adding things to the land, like farms, then streets, and buildings, so over a long time, things began to look how they look now. Does that make sense?”

“I think so,” he said. And he nodded off.

C, Kindergartener, is really ramping up on a lot of crucial topics that are set to become his everyday schoolboy occupations. He’s getting the hang of writing, a bit of math, and stringing letters together to begin to read. But he is still trying to grasp the the concept of time. Even the true length of five minutes is hard for him to comprehend. When he needs to wait for me to do something for him, like get him a snack or put on his favorite show, five minutes, by his reckoning, is just a count to five. But when he’s only got five minutes to play before we leave for school, those brief counts turn into hours. “That wasn’t five minutes!” He’s admant. “That was five seconds!”

So it’s no wonder that history, stretching back into the fog of time, is something he has a lot of questions about. That’s a lot of seconds, minutes, and hours for him to hold in his head. And so many of his fascinations are in the realm of long ago. So in C’s personal timeline, history looks like this:

First: Dinosaurs, of course. Then pyramids, and mummies.

Immediately followed by: Pompeii. His favorite.

Up next: Castles and Playmobil knights.

Which brings us straight to: The Revolutionary War.

Then: Papa is born. Poor Papa.

My own childhood fascination timeline looked something like this: Trilobites. Mummies. Ancient Rome. Barbarians and the Dark Ages. The 1950’s. And then you’re Back to the Future.

I must have also asked my parents constant questions about time, because on a trip to the Smithsonian, they bought me a book called Life Story, by the great Virginia Lee Burton (most famous for The Little House and Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel). I still have the book, and when C asks his questions about the Earth, and what came first then next, and how we got here, we read it together. I still love reading it.

My copy.

It has my name in fourth-grade handwriting inside the front cover, and it’s worn. Published in 1962, it presents the history of the earth as a theatre production, set on a stage, in acts and scenes, beginning with a time when the earth was a “red-hot fiery ball of matter,” and ending in the present, as the seasons change on Burton’s family farm in Massachusetts.

The book beautifully unwinds the tight coil of time into a long, gently turning ribbon; it’s a perfect metaphor. At the beginning of the ribbon is a tiny question mark – the very dawn of everything. The ribbon uncoils, introducing our Sun, and Solar System, and then the book zeroes in on Earth, our home, that fiery ball which cooled and shrank, making mountains like wrinkles. A Geologist on the stage hands over narrator duties to a Paleontologist, who announces the Rains, and the tiny creatures that lived in the great seas that washed over the entire surface of the planet.

Image from childrensbookalmanac.com

Page by page, new players are continually added to the theatre of Life on Earth, from trilobites and cephalopods, to the plants of the ancient forests. I remember, as a child, my favorite page was Act I, Scene 4: Life on the Devonian Shores. From about 350,000,000 years ago, to about 315,000,000 years ago.

“Land plants flourished, clothing our once bare Earth in green…The long Age of Invertebrates had come to an end. Seas, lakes, rivers, and streams swarmed with fish — big fish, little fish, and medium-sized. A few even developed lungs and crawled from puddle to puddle on land.”

In the accompanying picture, strange, curling ferns stretched toward a huge sun, while undersea fish with wide eyes and blunt teeth hunted smaller ones. After I got the book, I was fascinated by the sight of ferns. I tried to imagine that plants very much like the ferns I saw around my town lived millions of years ago, and if I looked at them, and tried to block out everything modern surrounding them, I could take myself back to that long-gone time. I felt like I was trying to recoil all of those ribbons, and hold all of time in my head in a little ball, trying to grasp it all at once, and feel its enormity. It was a great feeling; like a mysterious trance.

[C’s current favorite page is Prologue, Scene 4: Introducing first rocks, Igneous rocks. Featuring the world as one giant Vesuvius]

I decorated the inside cover of the book with Pterodactyl ink stamps that my parents bought me on another trip, also when I was about nine. We rented a house in Watkins Glen, on Lake Seneca, in the Finger Lakes of Upstate New York. When we got to the house, the yard and every tree in it was covered in black caterpillar-like things, about an inch-and-a-half long. A plague of gypsy moths. They were everywhere. And they were inside the house, too. Knowing my mother, I am shocked we did not get back in the blue station wagon and go immediately back to Long Island to spend the week in the sprinker on our smooth, concrete driveway. But we stayed.

We went to Watkins Glen State Park, where we bought the stamper in a gift shop at the end of a gorge trail. I don’t know if it’s still there, but at the beginning of the trail, I remember a railing with a timeline on it that took you further and further back into history with every step: past the fifties, the birth of Papa, Lexington and Concord, the plague, and the pyramids. To 350,000,000 years ago. And at the end of the railing, you emerged onto the trail, in the gorge, and back at the dawn of time.

This wasn’t like looking at a backyard fern and blocking out the garage and the concrete and the chain-link fence. The primordial world was all around us, without interruption, unbound. There were fossils in the huge walls of Devonian shale that formed the sides of the gorge, which was cut into the earth by a gentle creek flowing on and on over eons. There were plants – huge trees, as well as ferns and mosses, that had been growing there always. And the sounds – rushing water, wind in leaves – were the same sounds the first people must have heard as they walked through that same place thousands of years ago. All that was new were the railings that contained us, stopped us from falling down below, to a bottom I couldn’t see. And the gift shop, that was new too.

Watkins Glen, New York (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was enrapt, there in the gorge. I felt like I was actually winding back the clock, seeing what life was like before there were streets, and towns, or even foot-beaten trails in the woods. It was amazing. And now, as I listen to his questions, his car-ride conversations, I see C trying to to get to that same place, trying to wrap his head around history, or rather, wrap up history in his head, just like I used to do. I can sense him entering that wonderful trancelike state, playing with the ribbon of time between his fingers.

I need to take him to that gorge. And Pompeii. And a million other places.

As an adult, how do you get that back? How do you let your mind become unbound, unconstrained, uncoiled? How do you allow yourself to imagine the hugeness of the earth, of time, of everything? How can you keep that nerve that lets you believe you can hold it all in your head? Can we do this, can we thread it between traffic jams, and to-do lists, our grown-up cares?  Or do we need to achieve this through our children, let them out of their restraints, watch them as they try understand the world into which they were dropped?

Wheels Over Indian Trails

When my children remember being small, what images will come to their minds? Memory comes on like the pops of flashbulbs, one image, then another, until the light stays on to make a continuous picture. For me, Memory Number One is at age three, in my nursery room classroom, a dark room in the basement of a church. Cubbies and fingerpaints. The face on box of Munchkins. A set of stairs in the room that rose to a window, where we’d crawl out into the light, to the playground. Pop.

Next I’m in the car in the parking lot behind Miller’s Hardware in Lynbrook, New York, listening to “Love Will Keep Us Together” by the Captain and Tenille. Pop. “I will! I will!” Pop back to nursery school: the water table, plastic smocks, a Thanksgiving feast, a paper pilgrim bonnet, a turkey made out of an orange. Pop. There was a kid I dubbed “Ned the Head.” It was apt. He had a blond bowl cut. Where is he now? I think my mother knows but I won’t ask.

From when C was a baby we tried to take him on all sorts of adventures, thinking what he saw and did from birth would inform his character forever. He was eight months old when we took him to England, for a wedding, and we thought that though he’d never remember it, somehow the fact that he first saw the sea at the Jurassic Coast in Devon would always live within him. Maybe he’d grow up and crave ice cream cones with Flakes stuck in. Maybe he’d be a Hardy scholar. Maybe he’d buy his mother a retirement cottage in Lyme Regis. Nice thoughts.

C and his Dad at Beer, in Devon. Look over at the sea, C.

But subsequent, post-age-three trips to the beach in Long Island and Cape Cod have laid themselves over these first memories, and those trips pop into his head when now, at age 5, he thinks of the beach. Digging for something he calls “fish yolks” in the primordial ooze at the Brewster salt flats, throwing rocks into Gardiner’s Bay, or the surfside playground at Hither Hills. Pop.

The tide goes out in Brewster.

Now T is two, and we are on our own in the mornings before his nap, while C is at kindergarten. We trudge home after drop off. He plays trucks, blocks, looks at his books while I clean up breakfast, get started on the laundry. I think, I could take him to the farm/playground/Science Museum. But then, I think, ah, forget it, he won’t remember it anyway. The lot of the second child.

When we toured C’s kindergarten room before school started, it struck me how so many things hadn’t changed since I had been in kindergarten myself. I remembered the little colored plastic cubes they use to learn math. The calendar with numbered, changeable cards. Still the same. Pop. While C sat at a table and he and his new classmates stared shyly at each other, checking to see who would be the first to glue colored macaroni on a birthday crown, I chased T around the room while he took it upon himself to try out/destroy kindergarten. He grabbed at the calendar and I was brought back to that old room. Pop.

I heard the songs my teacher, Mrs Kurtzer, would bang out on the piano. “Abraham Lincoln kind and true. You did the best a man can do. Abraham Lincoln, we! Love! You!” I think she might have made it up on the spot. She did her best. There were the transparent, colored records she would play for holidays; an orange one for Halloween. Red for Valentine’s Day. The foods she would bring for each letter of the alphabet. Carob for C. It was the last gasp of the seventies. E was a tough one: “Edam Cheese.” I can still hear her say EEE-dam, and I think that’s the only time I have ever eaten it. Pop. Pop. The flashbulbs are getting closer together, and they must be for C now too. I must be careful what I say to him, I think. He’s going to start remembering it now.

That night I had a dream about going back to kindergarten. I was a parent this time, and I think I was supposed to be there for C, but it was definitely my classroom back in Oceanside, N.Y. In Mrs Kurtzer’s room there was a circle made out of black linoleum laid into the floor. We used to sit around the circle. In the dream, it was torn up; I could see where the circle had been, in an outline of crumbling, funny-shaped beige lino stuck in the old ruts. On top of the old circle was a big, colorful rectangular rug, like the kind we saw in C’s room. It made me sad to see that old circle, such an indelible image of school in my mind, carelessly ripped up and covered over. I had trouble falling back asleep after that; I had to go downstairs and watch a sitcom on TV at 3am.

Besides the typical flashes of school and home life, my early memories stem from our family’s frequent trips into New York City. It was probably then that I developed my abiding love for New York. Even now those first memories come back to me in a heady rush and make me miss the old place, more than usual. And for some reason I remember the journeys in and out more than I remember what we did when we got there, things like seeing the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, going up to Columbia to see my aunt and uncle, or eating lemon gelato at Ferrara’s in Little Italy during the San Gennaro festival. Instead, it’s the Southern State, crossing into city limits on the Cross Island, a huge full moon over the Belt Parkway one night on a return trip from Brooklyn.

But most of all, it’s this –

By John Fekner. © 1979-1990 Long Island City, NY. Pulaski Bridge overpass at the Queens Midtown Tunnel.  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The stenciling, in my memory, was more faded than it is in the image. When I see it in my mind the peeling paint is surrounded by a riot of traffic, grafitti, and slapped-up posters on the busy way into the city from the suburbs. On these trips, leaning back on blue leatherette in the back of a station wagon, I would anticipate this overpass and prepare myself to read this slogan. It filled me with dread. It couched my ever-present excitement to go into the city with sadness, and I went under the river feeling blue. But I guess if you love New York, that’s part of what you love; the melancholy, the ghosts of all the things that are lost, the dust heaps. The brutal passing of time, the bad dreams you have to live with if you want to press forward. Without that, the city could never be the continually changing fascination that it will always remain. And I’ll always mourn those indian trails, buried under a thousand levels of dust and asphalt, like I’ll mourn those palimpsests of early memories, my own and my children’s.

Right now, T is sweetly asleep. C is at school, sitting “criss-cross applesauce” on a brightly colored rug, tracing letters and learning songs, his head filling up with all wondrous and new things, and out will go the old. Until recently, he could still recall moments from his toddler days, but now, like me, he can only reach back to three. And I can already see, when we talk about nursery school, his old memories are popping like bubbles. He can no longer remember a time before his brother, but that’s as it should be. Later, after school, the three of us will go to Lexington for haircuts and ice cream, and play ball on the Battle Green, a patch of grass where, years before, something very different happened. Pop. While they fill their days with childhood concerns I’ll watch and remember, and act as steward for their early years, so those memories can one day, unlike indian trails, rise to the surface again.