I want to know what it says, the sea. What it is that it keeps on saying.
—Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (1848)
To quote J.D. Salinger’s narrator, Holden Caulfield, in the famous opening statement of the 1951 coming-of-age classic, The Catcher in the Rye, “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap,” and here Caulfield’s quote ends with, “but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
Well, I feel like going into it. And I differ from Caulfield in that my childhood wasn’t lousy; it was what came later that was. I started dictating my memories of my family relationship at the turn of the century in the summer of 2000 while on vacation on the Gulf of Mexico in Boca Grande, FL. I wasn’t then, and still am not, into computers. Although everyone who works with me is computer literate from laptops to BlackBerrys and iPhones, I still use a Dictaphone. I feel that thoughts can be transmitted quicker through voice than through fingers on a keyboard. So dictating memories instead of vacation reading, I continued later the same year from the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in Pine Knoll Shores, NC. Those vast, relentlessly sighing, giving and taking seas that command three-fourths of our planet seemed to call to me and demand introspection, and once started, I found it hard to stop.
I was born on July 23, the beginning of Leo, in Rex Hospital in Raleigh to North Carolina parents in the Chinese Zodiac Year of the Tiger, 1938. As a Republican, as was my father before me, I find it ironic that the house that was my home for the first years of my life has become the Democratic headquarters in Raleigh. I don’t remember much about the early years I lived in Raleigh. My memories really begin at age four, when my entire family moved to Ithaca, NY.
When I say the entire family, this included my father, my mother, my mother’s mother, and my mother’s grandmother. After my father and mother were married, he moved into her house. It was the middle of the Great Depression and times were tough enough to make ends meet for him to live in a house with his mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law, along with his wife. So I guess turnabout was fair play when he brought all of them with him when he moved to Ithaca.
After a short stay at the Ithaca Hotel, we crammed ourselves into a three-bedroom apartment in Belleayre, a building near Cornell University. My sister was not yet born, and I shared one of the bedrooms with “Muddie,” my great-grandmother. (She was a dear soul, but the main thing that I remember about her was that she snored.)