earliest memory?

I'm trying to concentrate hard enough to have my earliest memory come forth. I can remember before kindergarten, and I remember pre-school with Mrs. Chimes. I remember living on Aqua Lane, before Kathy was born. But we lived in a little house in Northeast Philadelphia for two years before we moved to NJ, and I have no recollection of that.

Here's what I can remember from living on Aqua Lane:

I remember asking my mom who the devil was.

I remember having dreams about water coming through my bedroom window and washing me down the short flight of steps to the kitchen.

I remember listening to 45s on our children's record player, and thinking the song "Animal Crackers in My Soup" was eerie.

I remember when four of my cousins spent the night and we got up before it was light out and my youngest cousin, Mark, turned the radio on really loud and woke up my mom.

I remember Mary Anne and I would, every single morning, say goodbye to my Dad as he was going to work and we would yell out the door after him, "DON'T FORGET TO FEED THE MONSTERS!!!" (I do not know where we got that from. Sesame Street?)

I remember sitting around the kitchen table and my parents asking Mary Anne and me, with enormous enthusiasm, "Who wants to go trick-or-treating tonight?!?" and, instead of saying "Me! me!!", Mary Anne (who was in kindergarten) quietly raised her hand, and then so did I.

I remember sitting around the same table and my parents telling us that we were going to have another brother or sister soon and how exciting that was.

I remember running home from this kid P.J.'s sandbox [as if he owned it. We all called it "P.J.'s sandbox," even his older sister, Heidi] and, when I got to the front door, I was surprised that there was a giant pumpkin decoration on it. (That's the second memory from Hallowe'en that year. I must have just turned four that September.)

I remember an older girl in the neighborhood, Barbara Weiner, told me that Ronnie Ferro (a neighbor) poured a whole bottle of ketchup over his head and said "Bloody Mary" in the dark in the bathroom and she appeared to him in the mirror. (I mentioned this to her a couple of years ago when I saw her while visiting Delran and she looked at me like I was out of my mind and said she did not remember, which was disappointing for so many reason.)

I remember that I liked the pink crayon in our Crayola box because it was mottled from having rubbed up against all the other crayons but pure pink on the inside.

I remember my two favorite books: The Laughing Dragon (top favorite) and Stand Back, Said the Elephant, I'm Going to Sneeze!! (second only by a smidgen -- my dad would do all the voices of the different animals).

I bet I could keep going. I wish I could remember stuff from northeast Philly, but I don't think I can. I know there was a girl named Darah who lived on our street at that time, and I feel like I could picture her, but maybe that's because my parents always made fun of her parents because her parents were of the belief that they should never say "NO" to their child. And, one day, when Darah was over and doing something she shouldn't have been doing, my father yelled the word so loudly at her that she got scared, started to cry, and ran home. That was before we moved to New Jersey.

How about it? Do you have your earliest memory? What was it and how old were you?

pass the peppers (raw, please, and hot)

See this little orange pepper? It's the last one hanging from the Carribean Red Hot Pepper plant I purchased out at the Feed'n'Seed [?]with my friend, MaGreen, over the summer. Since the weather has been so chilly, I brought it indoors to hang out in the sunroom. At its most fertile, the plant was bearing seven full peppers at once. We've eaten all of them. Hank ate one or two raw, right off the stem, and they are incredibly hot (nearing the Habanero-level of heat), but when you cook one of them, seeds and all, into a pot of vegan chilli or just some black or pinto beans, it lends the food a hot smoky flavor, almost chipotle tasting. It's astonishingly good.

You know, I grew up eating baloney and ketchup sandwiches on white bread, with a side of spaghetii-o's. We shook oregano flakes and garlic salt on our frozen pizza, and it was "spices." I remember when I first moved to Texas, I was invited to a Sunday brunch with a bunch of graduate students at my friend Louise's apartment in the Heights. Salsa, for me, was a ketchup-y sauce that came in a Tostitos brand jar. More sugar and vinegar than anything else. But at Louise's brunch, one of the guests, a Texan, made pico de gallo with fresh jalapenos, seeds and all. I remember being so hungry, and probably a little hung over, and going for this chopped tomato and onion concoction with drool coming down my chin. When I bit into the first scoop, a blast of hot pepper burned my tongue and the roof of my mouth like nothing I had ever experienced before. Trying not to be a rude guest, I stepped outside. The fire was so intense, I thought I would hyperventilate. I began to cry from the pain. My panic escalated everything. Something horrible had happened, and I wasn't sure what it was, but it was now in my esophagus and headed for my belly. As I was having this physical breakdown, Louise, good hostess that she was, came outside and found me red-faced and in tears. When I explained what happened, she reached up and patted me on the back (she is a full two-feet shorter than I am) and said, "Oh, it'll be okay, darlin'. Think of it this way: You probably knocked out every cold you might have had coming for the next couple of months just with that one bite." And she went inside. Cold? What?

Since this time, I have become more acculturated to hot food, especially peppers. A few years ago, before my friend Cake's apartment burned down, she had a potluck with a few friends -- black beans, tortillas, guacamole, etc. etc. Cake had a dish of freshly sliced jalapenos in a dish, and I think it was our friend KP who popped one in her mouth after the meal was over, saying something cavalierly, like, "Mm! O yeah, this will suck all of the heavy metals right out of my system." Really? Heavy metals? Hank, Cake, KP and I went, watery-eyed, through several rounds of whole pepper eating, registering the heat and the intensity of the fire, the oiliness of the chili, the sweetness lingering after the heat, and the crispiness of the flesh itself. I pictured all of the lead or copper or whatever heavy metal I might be storing in my cells sizzling as it came into contact with the pepper's oils. Each successive pepper was not quite as hot as the last, but still something to remark on as a flavor outside the realm of the ordinary. It was a severe high, elevating us into a realm of strange calm and sheer experience that lasted for about an hour or two. I will never forget how serene and communal the intensity of the experience was, and how we struggled to describe all of it in words.

The transition between the two pepper experiences was a weird and shaky road, but now I feel like I can savor the differences between these shockingly hot fruits. And I am proud of this little plant in the back room, bearing its last little fruit like a miniature sack of healthful dynamite.

cheers!

o my humunculous

Two days ago, when the freeze was here in full blast, I went about cooking to keep warm. I concocted a recipe for a delicious pot of split pea soup (now totally devoured) that I began in the morning and cooked through to perfection into the evening. It was excellent. That night, I put on a pot of steel cut oats for breakfast the next morning. It takes about 30 minutes to cook oatmeal in its non-instant form, and when you grate fresh nutmeg and cinnamon into it, it fills the apartment with a sleepy, incredible aroma all night long. It'll be cool in the morning, so you just have to re-heat for a few minutes and then off you can go to the first day of school, bright and shiny.

So, in any case, I had these two green apples sitting in the fruit bowl, and I thought it would be a good idea to slice them up and add them to the boiling water to mix in with the oats. Isn't there an instant oatmeal flavoring called "green apples and cinnamon"? It sounded like something you'd see in a television commercial, where everyone is warm and protected from the early morning gloom. As I cut into the first apple with a recently-sharpened knife, my aim was not true, and I sliced right through the tip of my thumb, which didn't really hurt (at first) but produced a lot of blood. In fact, I bled all over the apple slices and they were stained a weird pinkish color but, you know what?, I added them to the oatmeal anyway, and then went and bandaged myself up. As for the blood-oatmeal, Hank and I both ate it the next morning and, since you couldn't tell, I didn't even bother to mention it. (Surprise!)

This morning, the thumb is pretty much healed, although still a little sore. The flap of skin has come off, and there is an incredible dent at the tip of the digit, where it used to round itself out into completion. It's weird for me to look at and, for this reason, I've been reciting the following (hilarious) poem in my head:

Cut (by Sylvia Plath, 1962)

What a thrill --
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz.

A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they on?
O my
Humunculous, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill

The thin
papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man --

The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when

The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence

How you jump --
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.

f-f-f-f- . . . .

it's (almost) f-f-f-freezing in houston!

apparantly, we have a heat-pump system, and not a heating system, so there is no real "heat" in our apartment (took us two years to figure this out), but, instead, the system taps the outside air for any trace of heat, and sucks it into the vents. as a result, there is cool air blowing through the rooms.

it is very, very cold. pass the groovy quilt . . .

we brought the plants in, so please do not freak out if you are worried about the pepper or citranella plants, they have been brought inside, and are doing well.

are you wearing long underwear? i am not.

well-placed objects (and does it matter to memory?)

I got up early yesterday so I could accompany my friend Stephen to the airport with Melanie. Maybe it was that whole wheat bagel with veggie cream cheese, or maybe I got a good night sleep, or maybe I was desperately needing to re-establish some kind of order to my life (I feel like I've been traveling since before the holidays, even though I've been in Houston for the past week), but whatever the cause, when I got back home, I plunged myself into the project of deep-cleaning the apartment. Dust, sweep, wipe down, scrub, shake out, mini-vac, and organize. Not only that, but I also had enough energy left over to do several loads of laundry and take a trip to Target, Radio Shack, and Southland Hardware to pick up random domestic objects: new trashcan, floor lamp, hamper, radio, and some scrap wood and brackets to make a shelf for the wall in the sun room. Last night, as we watched Robert Bresson's _PickPocket_ (1959), a structuralist French film that seems to be less about theft than it is about doorways and the well-composed insides of apartments, I kept stealing glances around our place, liking its well-placed objects.

The visits of my life-long friend Stephen has an interesting effect on my sense of time and memory. While in his company, time gets re-routed to the deep past in sometimes totally surprising and often difficult ways, a never-ending maze of memories that do not emerge unless this friend is there to trigger them. What amazes me is how much is there, and I wonder how much we do not remember, if we could ever remember it all.

I found a photograph from highschool of Stephen standing in front of a class we took as seniors called A.P. Comparative Government and Politics. In the photograph, Stephen is giving an oral report on the cultural significance of teaching abroad and, as an intentional bad joke, he has written on the black board (which is actually green) "Teaching A Broad." He hunches over a little lectern, his right elbow resting on its top edge and bent so that he can press his hand to his downward-looking forehead. It is a self-conscious gesture of anxiety, as if he is being given a hard time for his sophomoric humor. He is dressed in the Catholic school uniform all the boys were made to wear (black polyester pants, black pleather shoes, your choice dress-shirt and tie), along with a pair of Buddy Holly-looking glasses. The only part missing is the burgundy blazor which we could take off if the teacher was cool enough to allow it. Stephen is not wearing his. The room itself is starkly institutional; we both forgot how sparse the rooms of the school were. In the upper-right hand corner, the black letters "EXIT 2" are stencilled in spray paint high on the cinder block wall. Neither Stephen nor I could remember what "EXIT 2" meant -- if it was some sort of fire emergency exit route, or a way of numbering and classifying the different doors and hallways in the building, and yet we lived under those exit signs for four years.

Interestingly, Stephen, at first, did not remember anything about giving this oral report, but I have long remembered it (the misfiring of the joke, the way we all laughed), and I wonder how much of it has to do with my possession of the photograph. Once he saw the photo, he remembered that he had chosen that topic because one of his favorite aunts had recently taught abroad, and he found her stories about it very interesting. (I am only now, as I write this, remembering that I don't think I gave an oral report for this class like Stephen did; or, if I did, I don't recall what it was about. I remember, instead, that I collaborated with a cool smart girl named Jen Laverty to argue for a radical position in a debate about the tactics of the IRA.) In addition, neither Stephen nor I, at first, could identify the other student caught in the frame of the photograph, a skinny-looking tannish guy with braces, who has twisted in his seat to the back of the classroom, cracking up. Within a few seconds I got it: that's Tom Rinkavage, someone neither of us ever knew very well, but how interesting that I could remember his name, possibly only because I was sitting next to Stephen at the time.

Does it matter to the clarity of these memories that I still consider this class to be one of the best I took in high school? That I remember how attractive the teacher's leftist politics were to me? That the teacher had long, brown hair that he wore in a ponytail and, when he took it out, it was actually an unflattering mullet? Does it make a difference that the man who taught us this class was, in March 1994, found strangled to death in a crawl space in his apartment several years later, and that the man who was arrested soon afterwards confessed, during the trial, to choking him to death during a sexual encounter they arranged for pay after they met at a pornographic bookstore? (See http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:erb2RfySruQJ:query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html%3Fres%3D9D02E4D9143CF932A15750C0A962958260+%22james+semptimphelter%22&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1 for the NYT report.) Does it matter that the case was all over the media, including the GLBT magazine The Advocate, which ran an article titled "Dial SM for Murder," and that friends of this teacher and members of the queer community in South Jersey wrote letters to the editor expressing their outrage at the sensationalization of the tragedy?

This morning, I'm lounging in a quilt in the sun room, drinking coffee and absorbing the sun coming in from the three huge windows. The room is bright, cozy with its red furniture standing out sharply against the quiet white walls and floor. In the weird corner of the room that sticks out for no reason at all, we have our six-foot-tall, skinny, green pencil cactus. This year, Hank purchased some red, glass Christmas ornaments and we hung a dozen of them from its branches. The result is a lovely holiday tree, simply trimmed. It is remarkable in the corner window, especially lit at night by a low-wattage lamp. Michael, our anthropologist friend, gave us the tree before he left town to do fieldwork in Chile. Thank you, Michael! The plant is healthy and looks great! (See Michael's blog here: http://frazer.rice.edu/~kriz/blog/)