Maybe five, old enough to climb a tree. The field between the apartment buildings where I grew up, age 0 to 12. Three memories:

(1) A photo of me in the field that’s not really a memory but more the memory of a photo, me alone walking through the field on a spring day. It must be spring because the field is full of dandelions in bloom and with me a toddler and my hair a whitish-blonde I blend in with the flowers/weeds, my hair a 70s bob. Returning to this field as a grown man maybe thirty years later. First time experiencing that incompatibility between a childhood memory and the present: how the scale is different, the two don’t fit, and you no longer have any association with either.

(2) The silhouette of the man who lived on the top floor looking down at me and my friend playing in the field in summer from the shadows of his window. It must be summer because he’s leaning out the window and says he has the Yankees game on and we could come watch. He has a pinball machine too and a life-sized wooden Indian with free bubble gum cigars. Mom and dad are pretty clear to stay away from this man, though. He just got out of prison for doing really bad things to little boys. He has curly gray hair and thick glasses that are a bit darkened and drives a cream-colored Mercedes. One time my friend David, who has a twin brother Daniel, bends the hood ornament back on his car and you can see a joint that looks like a knee cap at the base of it. I worry he’s watching us and has seen. I don’t go up to the apartment that day but David’s brother Daniel does and he’s never right after that. I don’t know how I know this looking back. I can’t tell if it’s a story that really happened or one I Imagined. Textbook cringe shit.

(3) Climbing the tree in the field alone, maybe five. Dangling my feet off the limb just sitting there thinking about nothing. Both my sneakers untied and just old enough I should be tying them. I go for the one but then a voice says I should start with the other. And always start with that one. Do it in the same pattern, too. I don’t know where the voice comes from but it’s like an inner authority. An amalgam of my parent’s voices and my own. This may not be unusual, but that I can remember its arrival that day in the tree seems strange. And that the voice has been with me all of these years, from that first day in the field.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: aging, coming of age, Creative Nonfiction, Nostalgia