365 Memories

It's a faraway memory, nearly lost in the tide of zeroes and ones that shape our new digital world. Sometimes, though, I do remember the calming effect of a safe light: the soft red glow that spilled through the darkrooms of my adolescence. Years ago (decades now, I'm amazed to say), I pursued photography as a serious study. I didn't go far with it, never approached anything near a professional level, but I took it a tad farther than just a hobby. For a time. I was still in high school, and the darkroom was a comfortable place to be—hidden from sight, engaged in the act of creating something, seeing images develop from nothing. I remember the smell of chemicals, the eddy of the water bath, but most of all the light in darkness. Red is usually a stimulant—to passion, to action, to anger—and it's associated with all kinds of vice. In the darkroom, though, it was none of those things. I did not meditate when I was a teen. I had no informed opinion of meditation. Still, wha...

A rhetorical question: What is it about boys and plumbing? It's not a question I will answer, except to sympathize with mothers of boys who have hit-and-miss aim or an aversion to flushing. You know what I'm talking about; I know what you're going through. But really, this post is not about those sort of plumbing issues. What I've remembered is something else. Namely, the fact that when I was in college I lived in Rhinebeck , New York (off campus), on Montgomery Street. My landlord was a veterinarian, and the apartment I rented was in a light blue house across the street. The house, I recall now, was at one time a home for boys. I never did learn what that meant exactly. Were they orphan boys? Was it a sort of reform house, where discipline cases were sent? What I did learn was that my living room was at one time the shower room. This explained the defunct spigots (Is that what they were? I confess I do not know my plumbing terminology) that you could see around the pe...

Three . . . Two . . . One . . . Ready or not, here I come! My friend's voice traveled down the hallway of her family's large, Los Angeles house. We were playing Hide and Seek: my friend, her older sister, and I. The girls went to my elementary school (we were in our last years), and they lived just down the canyon road from where I did. I remember being at their house fairly often, and also some kind of occasional car pool our moms had worked out. I remember that breakfast for them was often of the powdered sugar donut variety. Did I wish for the same, instead of my hard boiled egg and toast? Maybe, but not with conviction. Overall, I accepted (and now am very thankful for) my mother's firm belief in breakfast being the most important meal of the day and therefore her insistence that it be nutritious. I am now debating how to relate the next bit of info in a way that will not sound uncharitable. My intention is just to describe a fact, not a judgment, but, well, there aren...

Another lunch, another memory. Today I was with my mom in a fantastic new tea house in Manhattan (though really it's much more than that; the name is accurate but misleading). Great tea (and other drinks), wonderful food, relaxing atmosphere. One drawback: a bathroom with a sticky lock. After a minute, increasingly loud banging from within got my mom the attention she deserved; I (plus an employee) went to her aid. Because we knew it wasn't an ordeal that could have lasted long, it was more humorous than harrowing. We laughed about it once back at the table. But the incident brought to mind a powerful memory of another bathroom, another lock—with potentially dire consequences. To this day I don't fully understand the stupidity and dumb luck that conspired to make the entrapment possible. The location was our former apartment, on West 59 th Street. We (my husband and I, with our one-year-old son) moved into the apartment in April 2004, and this was quite a few months after ...

I don't consider myself a phobic person. I have never been afraid of heights (though I have blogged about a recent fear of flying, here ); in fact, I have been skydiving and loved the experience. I am not fearful of things like speaking in public or needles or spiders. I am not afraid to take creative risks or to make mistakes. I am not, strictly speaking, afraid of the dark. However, on this last item, I have to confess: it depends on what is meant by "dark." For most of my life, I thought I knew what darkness was—I don't mean metaphoric darkness; I'm talking about the lack of light at midnight. But I was raised primarily in large cities—New York, Chicago, L.A.—and in a city like this, the darkness is never complete. There is always a light-leak from someplace. You get ready for bed, turn off the lights, and at most it takes your eyes a few seconds to adjust before you see outlines of objects emerging from shadow. If you have a window in your bedroom, then you sl...

Although generally I am keeping anecdotes relating to my son off the blog (since he is a minor, and as his parent I am ethically bound to protect him and his privacy) . . . still, there is one early memory I have of him that has been on my mind a lot today for some reason, and I have decided to share it to illustrate a point about my family overall. I am sitting with my son in his room (the one in a former apartment that still had the look of a nursery about it), and we are reading Maurice Sendak's classic, W here the Wild Things Are . My son is not yet three years old. He's following along with the pictures, and suddenly he stops the story where Max has been sent to his room by his mother, and the boy's bedroom is about to transform into a dense forest. My son asks in a genuinely concerned voice: "Where are his books?" I'm thrown by the question, a complete non sequitur , and I look hard at those same illustrations that I grew up with and cherished a generat...

Sometimes, it's just too much. "It" can be anything at all: losing your keys, the series of phone calls you have to make to investigate a fraudulent charge on your credit card bill, a visit from the in-laws, the cat scratching the furniture, missing the bus, burning dinner, the rude person who lets a door shut in your face while you juggle groceries and a child, broken machinery, stepping off the curb into a dog pile . . . But sometimes there is nothing wrong, it's just a day with an overwhelming amount of work (real work and "busywork") that must get done, and you are just a one person with two hands. My mom and I have a shorthand for empathy in this situation. "Want to go scream 'shit' out the window?" we'll say to each other. It dates back to a specific moment of frustration, though I don't remember at all what it was about. We were living in Chicago—on Lake View across from Lincoln Park, which puts me at about eight years old. T...

I don't much care what bed I sleep in now—what it looks like, I mean—so long as it's reasonably comfortable and no one nearby is snoring. When I was little, though, I wanted a bed that was interesting, beautiful, and of course one that invited bouncing or some other manner of play. Better yet if the bed could accommodate friends, double as a girls' clubhouse of sorts, like the cheerfully painted bunks in Chicago or the full sized (double bed) canopy in Los Angeles. This post is about the canopy. I have been racking my brain trying to come up with the name of the tiny store in Brentwood (on San Vicente Boulevard, I think) where the bed was purchased. No such luck. A man owned the store, and it specialized in antique and reproduction (or all antique? all reproduction?) iron beds. The store sold beautiful hand-crafted quilts as well. When we moved to Los Angeles and I was allowed to guide the decor of my room and the furniture in it, I chose a dusty blue wallpaper that featur...