Sometimes we go on a search for something and do not know what we are looking for until we come again to our beginning.
—ROBERT LAX
I was rummaging around for a pen in my mother’s apartment when I found a grainy black-and-white photo stuck to the back of a drawer in her desk. It was taken of me as a toddler at the beach near our home in Greenwich, Connecticut. Stamped on the white, decoratively scalloped border is the year, 1962. That year, riots broke out when African-American student Phillip Meredith tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi, two members of the high-wire circus act the Flying Wallendas were killed when their seven-person pyramid collapsed during a performance in Detroit, and the United States and the Soviet Union came within a cat’s whisker of incinerating each other when our military discovered that the Soviets had placed nuclear missiles ninety miles off the coast of Florida in Cuba. It was also the year in which an unsuspecting black bear named Yogi was volunteered by the air force to participate in an escape capsule test. He was ejected from a supersonic aircraft flying at 870 mph at an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet, landing safely on the earth seven minutes and forty-nine seconds later.
It was a stressful year for everybody.
The photo of me at the beach suggests that young children are more conscious of what’s happening in their environment than developmental psychologists once believed. I knew that civilization was teetering on the precipice of annihilation, and I was ready.
I am sitting in a lifeboat.
The picture was taken with my mother’s camera, a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye, a perfect cube of black plastic with a gray knob on the side that you wound to advance the film. To take a picture, you had to hunch over the camera, looking at your subject through a small square viewfinder. The owner’s manual claimed the lens could take sharp pictures from “5 feet to infinity.” That’s a whole lot of camera for five dollars and fifty cents. Later, when my mother bought a new camera, the Brownie ended up in my toy chest. The knob made an awful grinding noise when I turned it because of the grit and sand lodged in the gears of the film spool. For a year it went with me everywhere.
My mother told me that if I removed the back of the camera and shook it hard enough, the countless memories hiding inside might tumble out. I gave it all I had, but not even one fell out. I would pay much more than five dollars and fifty cents to hold that Brownie in my hands again today.
So here I am in the photo, a towheaded two-year-old sitting in what I remember was a salmon-orange-stained lifeboat, waving and laughing at the photographer, whose identity is a mystery to me even now. Behind me, classic wood motorboats with elegant lines bob in the waves. I imagine men sauntering by off-camera in Ray-Bans and wearing short, skintight bathing suits only a Canadian could love.
When I first discovered the picture in my mother’s desk, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that the boy in the boat was not waving and laughing at the person snapping the photo as much as he was frantically trying to get the attention of the man I am today. He was beckoning me to get into the boat.
“Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to.” That’s what John Edward Pearce said. But what if your childhood was a train wreck? What if your memories of home are more akin to The Shining than The Waltons? It doesn’t matter. Home is not just a place; it’s a knowing in the soul, a vague premonition of a far-off country that we know exists but haven’t seen yet. Home is where we start, and whether we like it or not, our life is a race against time to come to terms with what it was or wasn’t. The boy was calling me to join him on a voyage through the harrowing straits of memory. He was gambling that if we survived the passage, we might discover an ocean where the past would become the wind at our back rather than a driving gale to the nose of our boat. This book is the record of that expedition.
By now, the attentive reader is wondering what I mean when I say this book is “a memoir of sorts.” I set out to write a conventional memoir, but after weeks of writing I discovered a vexing paradox: no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t tell the whole truth about my childhood by rigidly sticking to the facts.
John Irving describes the problem in his memoir, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed. “This is a memoir,” he writes, “but please understand that (to any writer with a good imagination) all memoirs are false . . . we can always imagine a better detail than the one we can remember. The correct detail is rarely, exactly, what happened, or what should have.”
This work dances on the hyphen between memoir and autobiographical fiction. Many of the stories in this book are more than forty years old. They are told as “through a glass, darkly.” They include approximations of conversations that actually occurred or ones I believe could have reasonably taken place, given my knowledge of the people and the events at the time.
In places I have conflated stories. I have compressed timelines. I borrowed from the memories and experiences of my siblings. I changed the names of people who did not sign up to be in my book. (For example, my childhood dog’s real name was Tigger, but I changed it to Waldo. He was very private.)
Some accounts are based on stories I’ve heard family members tell, even though none of us can agree on the details. These differences in opinion about what happened to whom nearly lead to bloodshed when family stories are recounted at holiday meals.
Memoirists work with bones. Like paleontologists, we dig up enough of them to make intelligent guesses about what a creature looked like a million years ago. But here and there a femur or rib is missing, so by faith, with imagination, we fill in those gaps with details we believe are consistent with the nature and character of our upbringing.
So what’s really true in this account of my life, you ask? If while reading you become uncertain about where the line between fact and fiction lies in my history, then welcome to my childhood. I felt that same uncertainty as a kid growing up, and even now as I try to relay it to you.
If you have a low tolerance for ambiguity, and these earnest attempts at transparency make you wonder if I’m to be trusted, then know that this book is true, either in fact or in essence, and most of the time—both.
This is a record of my life as I remember it—but more importantly, as I felt it.