Emotional Memory

Driving home from the Brooklawn ShopRite today on Kings Highway, I passed a house with an enclosed porch addition and it brought back such a strong childhood emotional memory of my family, as it was then, Dad, Mom and my brother Joe, driving from Philadelphia into New Jersey and down one of the Pikes, White Horse or Black Horse, I am not sure which, to Ocean City. We were going to visit my Grandmother Mabel Wright who lived there, for many years on 6th and Asbury Avenue and later on 1lth and Bay. As we drove through, what was to my city child's eyes, and in fact, in those days THE COUNTRY, I gazed at the small, tidy bungaows with their aprons of green lawn and their lawn ornaments of bird baths, or white wrought iron lawn furniture around shade trees and I felt so much joy and longing. We lived in a hard surface world of brick and concrete and asphalt with the ever present stench of the Publicker's whiskey Mash factory just below our neighborhood and the settling black gritty air of the vines of crowded highway encircling us.

New Jersey was a world of soft surfaces and the fragrance of cut grass and honeysuckle, the organic contours of tree lines behind the houses, and in the yards, patches of daffodils and forsythia in Spring, and roses and flowering trees in summer. What a world. It sent my young heart into a reverie. Today that feeling returned to me unbidden and unexpected. Afterwards, I thought it must be another of those functions of aging that I have heard about. We all know about hearing loss and diminishing eyesight, bad joints adn backs, and fading memory, but when they mention childhood memories suddenly floating to the fore, they don't mention the emotional memories. Actually, I don't think I ever thought of emotional memory before either, that is a memory that is pure feeling, rather than a short video clip of some event, or a picture memory of something you have seen. The memory produced today was pure feeling, a kind of glow in the heart and a dreamy return to another world which was my childhood.

It wasn't a sad childhood or in any way a deprived one, but there are things that I think of and have thought of throughout my life that I wish had been different. Recently I read a Friends Journal Essay about welcoming visitors from different classes. It fit with a book I read a year ago, CASTE, by I. Wilkerson. We have definite classes in our society and they have such different kinds of experiences for children growing up. A working class, urban child of my generation had some benefits modern children and children from higher socio/demographic classes may not have had. I had a non-working mother, for example. My mother was there every day, making breakfast, cooking dinner, at home after school and every weekend every day. A particular benefit of my childhood was that my mother was devoted to her vocation of home-making. She loved the home and she loved being a mother. She strove to provide us with so many things other children in our class and on our block didn't have. As I mentioned before, she collected green stamps and bought us Children's Encyclopedia. She bought me Children's Classics in Literatre for every holiday. My mother was different from the other mothers in our neighborhood. They all cleaned and clooked but my mother respected literature and she wanted to KNOW. We had magazines, National Geographic, Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post, House and Garden, FAmily Circle. My motheer was also creative and I often remember the things she made for us such as the baby cradle she made from an Oatmeal box for me. For her provision of these resources to my young mind I will be forever grateful. They made me who I am.

A day came when we, too, moved into a house in The Country, and we had a barbecue pit in the yard and a rock garden and grew vegetables and my father built a playhouse for the younger kids who had come along after we moved. And for that move to the Country, I will always be grateful as well. Maybe it's just me but I don't think that children should grow up in only hard surfaces. I think children need trees and plants and soft ground and good fragrances and seasons that don't go only from puddles to grimy snow and back. They need colored leaves and spring blooms and summer vegetables and white snow that lays a loving and soft blanket on rounded and curving contours other than parked cars. I am so thankful that I had that and that I was able to provide it for my daughter.

Some of the things that I wish had been different are the violence I was exposed to as an urban and working class child, and the alcoholism, and the horrible school I went to - all the insensitivity that children of the working class and in particular the urban working class are subjected to. There were places were gentleness and kindness and patience could be found, at the Grandmother's houses, and at church and Sunday School. I am sorry for children who don't have these sanctuaries in their lives.

Happy Trails, through the forest, the neighborhood, or MEMORY. Jo Ann