Every Year of My Life - 1976

Despite what the experts say about baby brains, this is where memory begins for me: faint impressions of the world I was witnessing while held by some relative or family friend who’d been warned to “be careful with his head.”

I was two years old. It was a world of verticals. Men’s shirts—including my father’s—were always unbuttoned, exposing strips of chest hair often punctuated by gold medallions or multiple gold chains. I think my dad might’ve worn a Star of David, despite being inescapably Scottish. My mother’s bright red hair was long and straight, reaching below her waist, swaying through my field of vision. Through our windows I saw other red brick buildings, other babies in strollers, other homes with other families doing other things. The sound of dishes being washed was probably as unpleasant to me as the sound of my screeching was to my parents. Even now imagining the sensory overload I must’ve felt, I feel slightly sweaty and nervous. I think we had a dog, a boxer, but I might’ve just seen one on television and not understood that the world inside the box in our living room wasn’t part of the world we lived in.

The sound of Teddy Pendergrass, Marvin Gaye, and The Commodores—achingly romantic, horny, although I wouldn’t have picked that up. My parents listened to a lot of R&B. North America was practically infected with horniness in 1976; post-Pill and pre-AIDS, herpes was the worst-case scenario. Pathologically unhorny, there was ABBA, and Dancing Queen, which I can hear while seeing my parents stockinged feet dancing in our kitchen.

Grandparents came to visit and squeezed me. Everyone smoked cigarettes, and everyone drank beer in stubby bottles. Because I grew up in Canada, everyone also criticized America, where I now live. Nixon “the crook” was gone, replaced by Ford “the dipshit,” who lost to Carter “the moron.” But I would’ve heard only sounds implying those words; all conversation was lost on me. I found it hilarious to shit in my diaper, but other times I found it terrifying, so I squealed until some bright object in my field of vision became more important.

I had two grandfathers. One—my father’s father—was comically short, and kept an empty bottle, a funnel, and a rubber hose in the backseat of his car in case he had to urinate while driving. Bright white hair protruded from both of his ears like the working ends of paintbrushes. He’d once studied painting with Harold Town and kept nude paintings of my grandmother in the basement, away from prying eyes. Thank you grandpa. The other—my mother’s father—was tall, and apparently had a lovely Scottish accent which I never heard because he’d lost his larynx to cancer and spoke through a hole in his throat with a vibrating beige device. When he lost his larynx he somehow also lost his sense of smell. My uncle apparently used to gift him women’s perfume in men’s cologne bottles as a joke.