My earliest memory in this lifetime: Me -- very young, one or two years old -- on the bed in my godparents' bedroom in Queens, N.Y., looking out the window at the El. Their apartment must have been two or three stories up -- the tracks were level with or slightly below the window. My perception of the track slipped back and forth between its matter-of-fact reality and a more extravagant, cartoonized version akin to a roller coaster.
My godparents: jovial, social, well-intentioned. Her pretty; him tall, good-natured, bland-featured. They had no children, always seemed awkward with me and so had little to do with me apart from sending a birthday card (no note, just their signatures) and bringing a gift whenever they visited my parents (always something they'd have known I wouldn't like, had they ever conversed with me).
My second-earliest memory in this lifetime: Three or four years of age, on a weekend outing with a bunch of boy-scout types -- my parents, my two brothers, some others of both those age brackets. Autumn, north of New York City (the Catskills? Bear Mountain?). Wooded, angled terrain, large rocks scattered around. Bare trees stretching up toward sky, their long shadows angling across ground carpeted with brown leaves. The air quiet, golden with afternoon light. Little sound apart from the crunch of crisp leaves beneath shoes. I remember sitting in the back seat of a car looking out at tree shadows stretching across brown leaves, I remember being out in the cool air, people around me.
Didn't especially want to be there, as I recall. Everyone else present was substantially older than my little self, me the only one not involved in scouting. That last remained the case throughout my childhood. Both my brothers spent years in the scouts, both my folks put in time as den parents. Everyone but me, and when it came down to it, remaining uninvolved suited me fine. Didn't want to wear uniforms, didn't want to do merit badge projects, didn't want to be part of these strange groups of kids under the tutelage of uniform-garbed grown-ups. And never was.
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Deep autumn has settled in here, most of the bright colors have faded away. A time that always feels a bit dreamy to me, inward-looking. Meditative. Conducive to drifting through memories, as I found myself doing on waking up this morning, huddled under warm covers, the air in the house cool. Finally roused myself, saw a landscape briefly sunlit before clouds crept in. Grabbed the camera, went out into cold a.m. air for a while.
Tonight I attend a poker game. [See entry of September 27.] Last time I couldn't seem to get myself into playing form -- repeatedly dropped cards on table and floor, couldn't remember games (it had been close to four years since my last attendance at a poker bout), couldn't seem to clear away mental cobwebs. Yet managed to win a bit of $$$. Not much, but still an achievement given my general fogginess. Will attempt a clearer, more respectable showing this evening.
Later.
rws 10:47 AM [+]