My Personal Madeleine

LUCY BURDETTE: even if you’ve never read Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, you will probably have heard of his madeleine. He described how biting into a madeleine cookie caused an old memory to resurface--which he wrote about for pages and pages and pages.

This morning I am wondering about objects in our home or office that might do something similar. Mine is an old dictionary with my name inscribed in gold leaf as grade winner of the Metropolitan Spelling Bee hosted by the Detroit News. When I see that book, or when I hear news of this year‘s national spelling bee, I am instantly back in sixth grade. I easily won my sixth grade spelling contest in our school and was sent on to the district championship. Sixth grade was probably the nadir of my shyest, most awkward years. I can remember my father quizzing me from a small booklet with a deep blue cover. I remember wearing black and white saddle shoes to the district competition (so very uncool!) I remember being too shy to ask anyone where I should wait, instead I fell into the nearest line. Other kids made mean comments and I eventually realized that this line was a class that was waiting to be seated, not a line for contestants. I also can remember like it was yesterday the word that I went down on. Epic. E P I C. Epic. Only it turned out it wasn’t that version of the word it was another, EPOCH. I definitely should have asked for a definition!

Can you put your finger on something in your home or photo album that brings back a very specific memory?

HALLIE EPHRON: Lucy’s question got me flipping through albums, looking for early memories. Here’s the earliest triggering a memory. It’s me (the little one) in my sister Nora’s lap with my sister Delia looking devilish to the side.

The picture triggers 2 memories. One is the dresses my sisters are wearing - they’re actually pinafores worn over white blouses (with lace collars and sleeves). I remember that when they got handed down to me the cotton was starched and scratchy. And I remember the wallpaper. That was the bedroom my sisters shared and the wallpaper was blue-and-white checked. Eventually my dad took over that bedroom and that paper got replaced with a neutral grasscloth.

So many of my earliest memories are purely visual.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I just saw an ad that some store was selling cereal-scented candles, supposedly to remind people of their childhoods. Trix is one, and Lucky Charms, and Cocoa Puffs. Okay, that’s weird, and let me just say those fragrances would not make me nostalgic.  But we have a photo of me with my sister Nina, she must have been four and me–seven?  We are on the patio of…somewhere, and we are having a foot fight. For the unenlightened (those not in my family) that entails sitting on the floor, feet out in front of you, placing the soles of your feet to the other person’s soles and then pushing to see if you can get your legs straight out and make the opponent's legs bend. We are really having fun, and it reminds me how close we used to be. They used to  call us Ann-and-Nina, as if we were one person. 

(Just as an aside, I was CLEARLY destined to win the spelling bee, and then I missed ALCOHOL. ALcohol! I think of that humiliation and frustration with myself every time I see that word.)

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I was thinking about this, and then a photo half hidden by the mouse pad on my desk caught my eye. It's a faded snap of a brown tenement building. A round rice-paper ceiling lamp glows in one window on the fourth floor. It's the flat my first husband and I lived in in Edinburgh. Just that glimpse and I can see it all so clearly! The two-bar electric fire in the sitting room, the heavy dark blue curtains in the bedroom, the convection heater we rolled from room to room (no central heating in these old Georgian buildings!) The biting cold. The view of the Calton Observatory. The smell of pasta cooking and the taste of sherry. Lovely how a little trigger can bring so much back.

RHYS BOWEN:  Such an interesting topic. I have various objects I’ve brought with me around the world. One was a baton presented to my grandfather, an orchestra conductor. When I was a child I used to try and conduct with this, not realizing it was ebony and silver and thus TOO HEAVY!

The other trigger is my mum’s sewing box. Even now when I open the layers and inhale deeply inside I can smell home. I can’t identify the scent but I’m there.

JENN McKINLAY: Butter tarts. As soon as I taste a butter tart, I am on the deck at our cottage in Nova Scotia. I can smell the salty bay just yards from the deck mingling with pine trees and abundant summer roses that surround the cottage. I can hear the brook babbling its way down the side yard to the beach, the buzz of the bees, and the zip of the hummingbirds as they fight over the feeder. I can feel the warm sun on my head and the hot cup of coffee in my hand. For a moment, everything is perfect.

 

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I was looking around the house for some aide de memoire I hadn't thought of in a while when i realized... I was wearing one! Two, to be exact. My mother, an always-stylish woman, got these chunky silver earrings somewhere in Europe back in the 1970s. They came to me after she passed away, and every time I put them on, I can see my mom sitting at her vanity or leaning forward toward the bathroom mirror, putting them in as a finishing touch to a chic minidress or a flowing Elizabeth-Taylor influenced caftan (Mom, who was very proud of her girlish slimness, had more fitted Moroccan styles than Liz.)

 

Although I don't have her figure, wearing these connects me to my mother's sense of style, and the way she always had one extra touch to her outfit to finish it off. If I smile in one certain way, I can see her again in the mirror. 

How about you Red readers? Tell us about a thing or a photo that evokes a specific memory!

Misty Watercolored MEM'REEES...

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Last week, as I was walking the dogs across the frozen, barren landscape that is Maine in February, I thought, I miss southern springs. I lived in DC as a young woman, and visited my family in Alabama over the years, and I have a visceral memory of the perfect, soft air in Tuscaloosa this time of year, with the greenery and flowers already growing. Despite being born in about as northerly spot as you can get in the US (the then-Air Force base at Plattsburgh, NY,) I spent my first seven years in much warmer climates - Alabama, Rome, Baltimore and then back to Alabama before heading to Germany.

Then I thought, what do I remember about the springs of my childhood? And the answer is… not much. Which turned my mind to the question of my earliest memories. Yes, this is the surprise topic twist! I have to think very hard in order to ignore the icy winds on my chilled cheeks during the dog walks. 

Julie, Barbie and Mom (who sewed the dresses.)

Ross used to tell me he could remember events from when he was eighteen months old, but I’m much more typical. My very first memory is meeting my new sister when I was three and a half. It’s astonishingly complete - the white woven bassinet, the light filtering through the gold-colored woven curtains in my parent’s bedroom, the slick feel of their coverlet (I got to hold Barb very carefully while sitting on the bed.) Then she disappears for a few years until popping up again in one of my few Baltimore memories: we were taking our nightly bath together and she had a tick on her back!

(A side note for our younger readers: yes, believe it or not, in the mid-sixties a tick in Maryland was a rare thing. Also, she got it because we were allowed to free-range roam all over the neighborhood, and we had spent the afternoon in a local swamp. Which was probably also a toxic waste dump, this being the mid-sixties)

Other than Barb’s arrival, I have nothing from my first years in Alabama. Nothing from Rome. My only other memories of Baltimore are of sitting in circle with my “boyfriend” Alan and the teacher telling me to stop hugging him. But I can recall the exact page, typography and all, that I first read by myself in her classroom: THE FAT CAT SAT ON THE MAT. (No pictures! This was a serious reading book, designed to make us proficient early readers and grow up to beat the commies in the space race.)

 

How about you, Reds? What are your earliest memories? And does everyone have an earworm from the song I referenced in today’s title?

RHYS BOWEN: I have very clear memories from an early age. Maybe this was because I was born in the middle of WWII and there was an atmosphere of tension in the air. I remember the sound of the air raid siren, in fact it still quickens my heart rate today. And searchlights in the sky still freak me out. I was only once taken down to the backyard shelter and had such an awful panic attack I was never taken there again. (But I’ve had claustrophobic dreams since). I remember clearly my grandmother’s living room, sometimes cooking a meal over the open fire because the gas had been turned off. And the blackout curtains. And the drone of planes coming nearer.  I also remember playing endless games of pretend with my blind great aunt. I was the good fairy and she was the bad witch. I was the good princess and she was the evil queen.  It took me a while to realize that in life one can’t always be the heroine!

 

I can remember making potions from flowers in the garden–the unpleasant smell of marigold petals and once I picked up our new puppy and he peed all over my dress. And we looked after a cousin’s cat and it escaped. And I had a doll in green velvet called Kathleen. And a baby doll I called La Baby (and I fed her puffed wheat into her china head). 

 

I had imaginary friends called The Gott Family: Gorna Gott, Leur Gott, Goo Goo Gott and Perambulator Gott. They did everything with us. (You can tell I had no real children to play with!

Life changed when my father came home from the war when I was three, so this all happened very early in my life. I still have a book of drawings I did at that time– I recorded all the exciting events–a visit to the zoo, a fairground, my first movie, Christmas, the street party when the war ended. They are all there in childish rendition but quite recognizable.

Hallie, plotting against an oblivious Amy

HALLIE EPHRON: So fascinating, Rhys and Julia! As for me, I have one very early memory of looking out through the bars of a crib in my childhood bedroom. Next up I remember my mother asking me to watch my infant sister for two minutes while she went to the bathroom. I was sitting on the couch and I think Amy was lying on the couch beside me. I must have been four. Before my mother returned, Amy had rolled onto the floor. Just the first of many times when I tried (unsuccessfully) to kill her.

 

JULIA: Hallie, same here. I don't remember it, but my mom liked to tell of the time she was cooking in the kitchen and I came in and said, "The baby's crying." She turned around, and I had brought Barb with me...by wrapping my arm around her neck and dragging her across the floor.  I sometimes think its a miracle we're such great friends now. 

 

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I do remember…looking through the bars of my crib at a huge giraffe (life size? Or at least wall-size) my artist mother had painted on the wall. The giraffe’s name was Jih. (You can imagine how that came about.) I can still see it. I also had a pink music box that was shaped like a radio, a big boxy thing on the dresser. And a music box with  a spinning ballerina, which, thinking back now, may have played The Dance of  the Sugar Plum Fairy.

Tiny Hank, reporting from the beach.

I also remember walking on the shore of Lake Michigan with my father, I was just so little, toddling, maybe three? And there was a carpet of dead alewives in front of us. I mean, I remember it as billions of dead fish. I can honestly see it now. I burst into tears, and leaped into my father’s arms–I was NOT going to walk through the dead fish.

He made me do it, saying they were dead and could not hurt me. (Let me tell you instantly, there was no one more gentle and loving than my dad.) I was hysterical, but he made me do it. (My stomach is hurting, telling you this.)

 

Years later, SO many years later, he asked me if I remembered that. I said I did, although I toned down how terrified I’d been.

He told me that it had haunted him ever since, and he apologized, saying it was the worst decision he’d ever made as a parent, and that he was only trying to keep me from being afraid.

 

JULIA: Oh, Hank. What a sweet confession to make. Everyone who's a parent makes one or two dreadful mistakes, but it takes real guts to admit it and apologize. 

Lucy and sister Susan, looking v. stylish

LUCY BURDETTE: The trouble is, it’s hard to sort out what I really remember from the stories I was told or the photos I’ve seen. When I was born, my family lived in a little white cape home up on a hill. It was only one bedroom and my sister’s crib (11 months old when I was born!) was out in the hall, so mine joined hers. (Could I really remember that?) We used to watch my father shovel coal from where it was delivered into the basement to heat the house. One day my sister and cousin convinced me to take a drink out of a pipe up the hill. It turned out to be kerosene–I remember being fed Ipecac so I’d throw up. (Of course, that’s the wrong thing to do…). Is it possible I remember that, or was it what shrinks call a ‘screen memory’? I have no idea!

JENN McKINLAY: I don’t know if it’s my earliest memory, but it’s certainly vivid. I was in my crib and my brother helped me escape by showing me how to climb out. I have no doubt shenanigans were involved. They were always involved when we were on the loose. 

The original Hooligans!

We had a gloriously free range childhood in the seventies and spent most of it outdoors running wild. I think that’s why I value my daily walks with my dogs so much. It reminds me of what it felt like to be free from obligations and to go wherever the mood led us, whether it was along the banks of the river, up the mountain, or into the village to buy candy. I try to walk different paths every day with the dogs so that it feels more like those childhood adventures and I’ve discovered so many wonderful things like the neighbor who gives out lemons, a little free library, massive grass carp sunning themselves in the canal, and all sorts of birds in the nearby pond. I feel like my brother would approve. 

Nice nod to CATS, but I hear Barbra Streisand singing it in my head – where it will replay all day, thank you very much.

Don't eat anything bigger than your upper body, Debs!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Thanks for the earworm, Julia! My very earliest memory–I think–is of playing with my stuffed animals in my crib when I was supposed to be taking a nap. My crib was in the room I shared with my grandmother, which became my bedroom until I was grown up and moved away from home. I can see it perfectly, the crib on the west wall, where I could see the tops of the trees that surrounded our backyard. 

In the next memory, I’m in our den and it’s cold. There’s a fire in the fireplace and I’m coloring next to the hearth. I’m wearing my favorite green corduroy overalls and my grandmother is there. Another time, I think I remember being put on my dad’s big horse, Midnight, but that may be one of those “photo transfer” memories.  

 

JULIA: Now it's your turn, dear readers. What are your earliest childhood memories? And for those of you too young to recall the song from the title, please enjoy Barbra Streisand in all her 1973 glory, singing The Way We Were: