Seen and Unseen

So much has happened: The passing of Richard Smallwood. (And I just posted how Bach influenced Quincy Jones, as Bach’s music did for Smallwood.) And George Clooney and his family became citizens of France, because, he said, it is a better place to raise children. (So, should I move up my chapter on living in Paris as an 11- to 14-year-old, highly relevant to what the Clooneys will now face, including “The Year I Was Chinese”? No, I didn’t believe it either, but let’s leave that for the future, and stay with Plan A:)

Mom and Dad, Grandparents, and Earliest Memories

One of my most vivid early memories is of death: my own. I was upstairs in my bedroom taking a nap, reaching only half-way down the bed, and it was quite real, most memorable not because of my death (I didn’t know what that was) but because I was swimming underwater in fresh water. That was new to me: until then, I had only swum in salt water, in the ocean or in the inlet behind our summer house at Westhampton Beach. And it ended as I was suddenly drawn backward, toward the surface, and a churning bubbling mass of white water, and something hit my right foot. The dream was so vivid that I got out of bed and told my parents about it. And that means it was almost certainly Saturday, the day they would both be home.

But then in recent years, in fresh water, swimming in a pool, I bashed my right foot more than once, hard, once I thought it might be broken. “Ah, the reenactment,” one of my shrink friends might say. So perhaps that dream was a prediction, a premonition, or something else. Put a tab on that, more to come later.

Another early memory from about then, in our station wagon, when my father hit the brakes hard, to avoid an accident, sending me flying into and shattering the windshield. I kept apologizing for breaking the window, but Mom and Dad didn’t seem concerned about that; adults can be so odd. (And that was one of at least three severe head traumas I had, and MIT “wet lab” people will tell you from studying combat injuries that they can change the brain in unusual ways. And yes, I used to volunteer to be a test subject in those and many other labs; why? It was part of my MIT education: The best way to know what some cutting-edge labs were doing was to be one of their guinea pigs. Oh, and they paid me. But more of that later. . .)

Another memory, which had to be if anything even earlier: “Inie, put the window down!” On one visit to my grandparents, I could not climb over the wooden bars around my bed (crib???) to go close the huge window of the dining room, where I usually slept, and which was open to the winter air drifting inside from 149^th Street.

“Inie” was my name for Inez, my grandfather’s second wife, my grandmother – or more precisely, step-grandmother. (Mattie, his first wife, had died years earlier.) Inie taught me how to read at age three, using labels from 78 rpm records and daily newspapers, which usually featured front-page articles about the Korean War. I remember wondering why the U.S. couldn’t just win and then soldiers would come home.

One day a few church members were visiting and, believing that “the little boy” could not possibly know how to read but instead had memorized the order my grandparents’ records were stored, took them out of the cabinet and rearranged them. I remember thinking, “Adults can be so odd. That’s not right.” And in front of them I rearranged the 78s back into their original order, talking about the music of each disc. Then I took them through the Sunday Daily News, which I assumed they had not yet had time to read. My grandmother beamed.

She also taught me arithmetic, showing me how to add and subtract using the huge (to me) ledger that she kept as treasurer of the coop where they lived. It all seemed so magical, the pale green and cream-colored columns adding and subtracting, and the rows for different functions and actions. (So I arrived in pre-kindergarten already knowing reading and arithmetic, the start of an edge I could keep for years – including almost three decades later, by astounding, incredible coincidence, if you believe in such things, at CBS News. But I digress. . .)

My grandfather had had a stroke, so he was not very mobile. With him, I have two early memories. One was that he let me sit on his chest and comb his silver-white hair; he was always smiling, even when I pulled hard at a tangle. The other was my early adventure in cooking.

Inie showed me how to make a fluffy cheese omelet, almost a souffle, which she learned in her native South Carolina (secret: beat the egg whites separately from the yolks). One morning when I was visiting them, I made one for my grandfather. But leaving the kitchen I slipped, and the eggs went onto the floor. Ah well: I turned around and made another omelet – my grandparents seemed so happy. Then I went back in the kitchen and ate the one that fell on the floor.

My parents and grandparents were not all together very often. Either I was at home in Mount Vernon with my parents or they were out of town, and I was staying with my grandparents on Convent Avenue in Harlem. Sometimes we were all together on Sundays after church, but always on Convent Avenue: My grandfather could not travel easily. He had the reputation of being an expert carver, and people in church loved to tell the story of how he had fed a large dinner with one duck by making such thin slices. The number of people at that dinner seemed to increase with each telling of the story.

My other early memory around that time was when we lived in White Plains, before moving to Mount Vernon, a memory of a huge blizzard, the snow up to my eye level. We were all outside shoveling snow, and I joined in with a tiny toy shovel. Seeing a neighbor, also out shoveling snow, I wanted to say hello. To say my mother didn’t like her would be an understatement: She called our neighbor “that cow.” So I greeted her, “Hello Mrs. Cow.” My mother was appalled but my father roared with laughter, a couple of paired reactions I would see often in later years, at the family dinner table, in a hotel room in Paris, and one night when Duke Ellington and his orchestra came over for dinner.

All of which leads me to the next excerpt, growing up with my parents, coming soon. . .