I've been told on several occasions that the earliest memory someone has is rather telling about that person's personality and their life trajectory.
Granted, the majority of times when this comes up as a conversational topic it's at a party where you could have brought a book about Ottoman taxation practices and had a better go of things. It usually follows that awkward silence that comes on the heels of someone revealing that their number one celebrity 'gimme' shag would be Condoleezza Rice, but only if she was dressed up as a maiko geisha and spoke exclusively medieval French.
Initially, I struggled with this concept.
I mean, hello? One of my dearest friends' first memories was of dipping down into her pull-up diaper, discovering "paint", and finding sublime delight while frescoing her home with a medium which she had quite surprisingly made with her very own body. I have to presume that this is not a way in which she continues to express herself, but I have been wrong before.
While listening to a surround-sound version of "The Oh of Pleasure" by Ray Lynch in complete darkness after I had taken a Tylenol Cold and Sinus, I probed my memories to see what I could make of this issue.
Memory One: I remember walking in to my mother's room and finding her in the dark, flat on her back, glistening with flop-sweat, with my foetal sister lying in wait under an enormous gravid protrusion. Julie was mere weeks from being born, and my mother was clearly uncomfortable in a way that I would never be able to comprehend, but much more important in that very second, I needed to explain to her that I had been savaged by a goose while I was feeding the ducks at a nearby wildlife flyway preserve. "It beaked me", I explained, showing her the enormous, shiny pink lump flowering on my forehead. I had wanted to go so that I could see the ducks and geese on their nests, and I'd hoped against all hope that I could see their magical, magical eggs. In return, I'd nearly been murdered.
She didn't really have it in her to comfort me, as she was preparing physically and mentally to push a nearly ten-pound bologna-loaf out of a place that really wasn't going to appreciate that departure too much. However, I remember feeling as though in the act of ratting that goose out, my mother would have no choice but to find it and throttle the life out of it. Just...later.
Hmm. I would have been about four years and one month old then. OK. Earlier?
*music swells to a crescendo - it sounds like celestial Humpback Whales providing each other with unearthly pleasure, and I am momentarily ashamed of them for their unbridled, and entirely fictional, passion*
Memory Two: It was dark and there was a strange, pleasant hay and manure smell as I entered the hen-coop. Drowsy hens tutted and scratched, their eyes glinting in the scant light provided by my entrance. I had a basket aclutch in my right hand, and a croquet mallet in the other. "Some of those hens won't want to give the eggs up", my grandmother had told me, "so you can push them off with this." She paused. "If you see those geese, you can swat them with that, too."
Geese?
In the semidarkness, I probed the nest-boxes, each recently vacated as the hens left the coop to mill about, drink their tepid water, and defecate indecently. The boxes were still warm. In some of them, a little ovoid treat awaited me. I gingerly placed each egg into the basket and, when satisfied with my magical experience, I brought the eggs to my grandmother. While I watched with naked horror, she broke each one of them into a bowl and began mixing them. "Is scrambled all right?", she asked. I nearly fainted at the indignity.
Nope. I would have been about five then, as I remember the newest, most wet/sticky member of the Potorti household was about a year old. She got a My Little Pony party for her birthday. I did not, though my black little heart wanted one. She didn't even appreciate it, as she was guess what one year old. I will take that to my grave.
Memory Three: A neighbor comes home from hunting in the forests of western New Jersey. In the bed of his truck, five Ring-Necked Pheasants reposed in various states of rigor. Even in death, they glimmered like a cluster of mismatched costume jewelry. I couldn't believe that he'd had the nerve to broadcast that he was, essentially, a serial killer. As he described how he would have his wife skin and marinate their breasts, the gorge rose into my throat. I finally managed to ask him, my voice wavering slightly, if I could have some of their tail feathers if he wasn't going to keep them. He yanked some out rather roughly, and I nearly swooned as their deceased heads bobbed about hellishly, but he handed me the feathers and smiled. I silently swore a blood-oath that I would avenge their deaths even if it meant that I would have to rise from my own as a nosferatu.
Uh uh. I was seven. This isn't working, I thought. Surely I have earlier memories? Also: would gin be inadvisable at this point?
Memory Four: I was walking with my father in our small neighborhood. It was spring, and everything was Gaea and groundsong, and I remember distinctly that the tree near our front door was budding. At the base of that tree, which branched out over the sidewalk, I saw something blue.
It was half of a robin's eggshell.
I ran over to it and squatted over it like I was panning for gold. My father came over to find out what had attracted my attention and he pulled me backward. "Don't touch that. It's nasty."
About ten feet away from the eggshell was the corpse of the baby robin. Pink and alien with protruding stormy slate blue eyebulges, it sat cooking on the pavement in its own juices. Flies had begun to gather. It had been knocked out of the nest by the storm the night before and had perished, alone and hot, mere meters from my home. I didn't even try to reach for it; I knew it was dead, and I knew I'd get another lecture about nastiness. I remember wanting - needing - to hug my stuffed rabbit very, very much at that moment.
I would have been four then, too. What the ever-living Mumm-ra?
Memory Five: The tiny red thing on the ground moved slightly in the breeze. I went to go pick it up and noted that it was a feather. It was a feather from that weird red bird that came to see us at the window sometimes with his friend who looked like him, but was brown. But I didn't know the word "feather." My mother asked me what I had in my hand, and I told her that it was a bird-leaf.
I would have been three. Apparently, my earliest memory is of telling my mother that birds had leaves, and that sometimes these leaves fell off just like that horrible half-dead houseplant that she was trying to nurse back to health in the living room.
ARE YOU SENSING A THEME HERE PEOPLE ARE YOU I MEAN WHAT THE HELL
I came out of my Tylenol Cold & Sinus-induced trancecoma just as the entirely fictional celestial cetaceans climaxed. Good for you guys I thought as I reached absently toward my pile of current reading material. Though "randomly" selected by friends through a Facebook request, a casual observation of the books would likely lead one to presume a number of things about me. These would not likely be comely assumptions, and they're *probably* not true, but that old chestnut about one being what one reads came sharply into focus.
*The iPod begins playing the next song, a jingju (Peking Opera) aria from an opera called "Zhou Ren Sacrifices His Sister-In-Law." Of course. Of goddamn course.
Alright. What was I reading or being read as a child that would cause me to be only able to recall bird-related things as my first memories? Why was I pointedly obsessed with eggs, and feathers, and the hidden warm splendor of a nest? Why did I look at birds with a mixture of fierce joy and naked, bald envy?
Naturally I kept most of my favorite childhood books, and I scampered into the Room of Requirement to find my oldest and most cherished of them. The first book I found was the one I remember reading earliest - it was a loveworn hardcover copy of a richly illustrated How Fletcher Was Hatched.
*Zhou Ren (probably) begins singing about how really dead his sister-in-law will be when he sacrifices her, all to the staccato beat of an accompanying Hubei clapper quartet. Somehow, even though I can't understand a word they're saying, my black-husk beats tremulously*
For those unfamiliar with the story of Fletcher, let me spoil it just all to hell. There's a hound-dog, and he's beloved by a young girl. He starts feeling down because she starts paying more attention to some wee chicks that had hatched, and in the belief that she only likes things that come out of eggs he runs away and goes down to the river and makes friends with an otter and a beaver and they build a wattle-and-daub egg around him so that he can later burst forth from it when he sees through his breathing-hole that his little girl misses him. Like, he waits for her to cry. In the meantime everyone in the town is convinced that the huge egg is from a dinosaur or something, but when he breaks out of it they're all like oh look. A dog. And then he is reunited with his little girl and everything is all right forever.
I am not even making this up.
How Fletcher Was Hatched was published in 1969, when lessons that were taught to children through media like this were...different.
"Run away when things get weird."
"It's OK to be weirdly possessive of girls."
"Make friends who will willingly entomb you to get attention."
Though there may have been lessons to glean or a rounder narrative of betrayal, loss and canine resurrection, I have to admit that it was the egg that did it for me. If Fletcher had been encased in anything else (an Egyptian sarcophagus? a golem? a mouldering crypt? Oh wait all of those things are AWESOME SO I AM NOT MAKING MY POINT) I would likely have not paid much attention to it. But here he was, getting wattle-and-daubed into a giant freakin' egg and I was like WHERE DOES ONE FIND AN ENTERPRISING AND CLEARLY HOMOSEXUAL PAIRING OF A RODENT AND A MUSTELID AND WHAT KIND OF ALLEGORY IS THIS REALLY
*Based on extended stylized weeping, Zhou Ren is likely dispatching his sister-in-law at this point, and man, did that bitch have it coming*
I put the book down and looked around at what my life has become in the thirty-plus years since I first picked it up. Patterns of memory - of comfort and despair, of indignation and redemption, of the sacred and the profane - pushed me further and further, quietly and slowly, toward the birds that have been waiting patiently for me. Is it coincidence that I now know what a Bald Eagle's breath smells like or how warm the bill of a Great Horned Owl is when pressed against my chest? Did something inside me fairly scream out to those who have graciously permitted me (in every sense of the word "permit") to work with a flock of education raptors that I'd secretly been ready to do it my whole life? Was it fate that when said Great Horned Owl - a bird who has become insanely dear to me - laid her first two eggs this Spring that I was the one who found them, and that I cried?
*Flashmemory to me sitting on a nest of plastic Easter eggs in a nest I'd made out of an afghan*
*Flashmemory to me getting my first bathrobe and being delighted that I finally had wings*
*Flashmemory to me looking at the distant "V" of migrating geese and wondering when I could join them*
Thank you, Fletcher. You're not even a little bit real, and that's OK. However, you did something to me that is, and continues to be, very real, and I guess that probably excuses the petulant douchebehavior that somehow managed to involve two slightly anthropomorphized furbearers. Go frolic with Alexandra. You deserve it.
The house falls silent as my iPod chooses that precise moment to die. It's OK. It's Fall and it's almost time for the Sandhill cranes to migrate. They sing a prehistoric song that I've apparently been listening to my whole life, and that's all the music I need.
Oh, and Bruce Hornsby. I need him too. For reasons.
****
Domonic M. A. Potorti
09/18/2015
